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"J"he 3outh 



ITS 



INDUSTRIAL, FINANCIAL, 



AND 



POLITICAL CONDITION. 



BY 

A. K. McCLURE. 



OFCO- ..^^ 

MAY M 1886^ / 

WASHING^- 



PHILADELPHIA : 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 
1886. 



Tzi5 

Mil 



Copyright, 1886, by A. K. McClure. 



<i|| |"stepeotyfersandprinTIrsI ||I' 

* ^ :„^ 71^ ^W Jii ' 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction 5 

Arlington, the Home of Lee 9 

Richmond — Virginia 19 

The Sister Carolinas 29 

Columbia — South Carolina 40 

Charleston 49 

Georgia — the Empire State of the South . . .58 

Montgomery — Alabama 77 

Mobile Harbor and Rivers 85 

Birmingham — The Southern Iron Centre . . . .96 

Mississippi 109 

Louisiana 121 

Nashville — Tennessee 136 

Florida— Orange-Growing 149 

Florida — Health and Products 163 

Florida's Reclaimed Lands 174 

Hints to Florida Settlers 186 

The Sugar Industry 198 

The Negro as a Ruler 206 

The Race Problem 217 

Jefferson Davis 231 

Mrs. James K. Polk 239 

The Home and Grave of Clay 247 



INTRODUCTION. 



This work is presented without any pretence of 
literary merit. It gives, in carefully-revised chapters, 
the results of several recent journeys in the Southern 
States, during which the grave political, business, and 
race problems were dispassionately and industriously 
studied ; and the fact that a few of the chapters, 
written as long as five years ago, are more than 
vindicated by the rapid progress of the South in all 
that makes material advancement, fully warrants the 
later and more hopeful view of early Southern pros- 
perity. 

Believing that we are soon to date the turn of the 
tide of foreign immigration from the West to the 
South ; that we are soon to note a rapid migration 
of skilled labor from the North to the South ; that 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

Northern capital will, at an early day, turn South- 
ward to manufacture iron, mine and ship coal, spin 
and weave cotton, and rear machine-shops ; and that 
the surplus population of our fields, our mines, our 
forests, and our mills will gradually but surely seek 
the better facilities for requited industry in the South- 
ern States, I offer the suggestions of these pages for 
the considerate judgment of progressive people of 
both sections. 

There are yet lingering sectional prejudices in both 
North and South, and they have greatly hindered the 
rehabilitation of the impoverished insurgent States ; 
but the war now belongs to the memories of more 
than twenty years ago; its warriors of blue and gray 
are rapidly passing to join the great majority that 
has gone before, and a new generation is fast filling 
the places of the men of the generation that fought 
the most heroic battles of history. The victories of 
peace are now to become their chaplets, and the sur- 
plus capital and industry of the North will soon be 
inseparably interwoven with the New South. To 
hasten the complete restoration of fraternal and busi- 



INTRODUCTION. y 

ness intercourse between the North and South, and 
thereby enlarge the prosperity of both, is the aim of 
these chapters, and if they shall, even in a feeble 
way, contribute to that grand consummation, the 
author will be more than compensated for his labor. 

A. K. M. 

Philadelphia, May, 1886. 



The South: 

ITS INDUSTRIAL, FINANCIAL, AND POLIT- 
ICAL CONDITION. 



ARLINGTON, THE HOME OF LEE. 

One of the mellowest of early winter days tempted 
me to revisit the historic Arlington Mansion, once 
the palatial and hospitable home of Robert E. Lee. 
It is visible from almost any point in Washington, 
although several miles distant on the sunny side of 
the Potomac. Its massive white Grecian columns, 
half hidden by the native forest on the north and 
south, are unobscured by the evergreens and few 
monarchs of the primeval Virginia wilderness which 
survive on the gentle, undulating slopes from the 
heights down to the silver line that divides Wash- 

2 9 



lO THE SOUTH. 

ington from the Mother of Presidents. The beau- 
tiful Capitol and the Arlington Mansion face each 
other, and present the most attractive views from 
their respective eminences. Looking from the west- 
ern windows of the Capitol, across to the crescent 
of hills that skirts the Virginia side of the Poto- 
mac, Arlington first attracts the eyes of the ob- 
server, and the distance of several miles is none too 
great to lend the grandest enchantment to what 
was the proudest of Southern homes but twenty- 
five years ago. The ravages of the gnawing tooth 
of time ; the widened seams between the once fault- 
less lines of masonry ; the blistered and scaling 
colors which deform the surface of pillar, wall, and 
door; the countless marks of decay which tell the 
story of the deserted home and the stay of the 
stranger, — all these are effaced from the picture by 
the distant gaze, and Arlington looks as beautiful 
and as homelike as rt was when Lee made his last 
sad journey across the river as an ofiicer of the 
army that pointed to him as one of its brightest orna- 
ments. Like Scott, on whose staff he was the most 
beloved and trusted, Lee was a Virginian, and his 
resignation was one of the keenest blows that had 
then been felt by his chief. Both were sorrow- 



ARLINGTON, THE HOME OF LEE. n 

stricken at the separation to draw their swords 
upon each other; and there is little doubt that Lee 
would have halted at the threshold, could he have 
foreseen that his devotion to his mother Common- 
wealth would make him the captain in a struggle 
for a new nationality that must have perished more 
ingloriously had it won its battles, than was its 
recall to the Union by the sword. 

I had visited Arlington but once before, and the 
day was a memorable one. Charleston, the city that 
had long been cherishing rebellion, had just been 
captured after many disastrous failures to possess 
that Confederate stronghold. While standing on the 
broad, unevenly-tiled portico of Arlington, looking 
out between the great columns to the Capital that 
seemed then for the first time in four years to be safe 
from the insurgent, the hour of noon was struck by 
the signal-gun of Fort Whipple, hard by, and as 
quick as sound could fly to report the command, a 
thousand guns responded from hill to hill, shouting 
their hoarse song of victory over the Lost Cause. 
What appeared to the casual observer as simply a 
cluster of wooded ridges along the Virginia shore, 
belched forth their columns of smoke and thundered 
to the world the tidings that free government had not 



12 



THE SOUTH, 



perished from the earth. Full half a generation has 
passed since then, and change has wrought sub- 
lime achievements in all sections of the country 
during twent}' years of peace ; but Arlington is only 
twent}' years older, as is told by the ceaseless offices 
of decay, and there the story ends. Its histoiy has 
not abated in public interest. It is still the one 
home, next to Mount Vernon, around which cluster 
tlie fondest memories of Washington, and the sad 
retribution that followed the estrangement of Lee 
from his country is known in ever}* section and 
clime. His memory is cherished in Virginia and 
in tlie South in a wealth of affection, and as the 
clouds of passion are clearing away in the North, 
there is naught but respect and sorrow for the Chris- 
tian soldier who so loved a State as to be misguided 
to fraternal war that widened into boundless bereave- 
ment and desolation. 

A heartsome drive through Washington, with its 
broad and well-pav^ed streets, its varied architecture 
in its cheerful-looking homes, its innumerable parks 
and tri-angled greens, and its many monuments of 
tlie country's greatness, brings you to Georgetown, 
where Washington aristocracy reigns unsullied by 
mixture with the promoted plebeian or the adventurer 



ARLINGTON, THE HOME OF LEE. i^ 

of the Capital. Thence a rickety bridge, dilapidated 
in everything but the measure of its tolls, lands the 
visitor on the sacred soil of the once proud Old 
Dominion. There are few evidences remaining of 
the fortifications which displayed bristling guns when 
last I journeyed to Arlington. The ruder of the 
structures hastily erected to serve the purposes of 
war are seen here and there, with decay stamped 
upon them, and fenceless fields tell how the indo- 
lence and thriftlessness of slavery yet rule. Not 
until the well-beaten road turns into the pillared 
gate that opens the National Cemetery are there 
signs of care and industry; but the long, regular, 
white lines which traverse the carefully-garnished 
lawns tell a strange and sad story of war's multi- 
plied retributions. Throughout the winding roads 
which gradually ascend the heights to the Arlington 
Mansion the grave-stone is never out of sight ; and 
around the gardens up to the very pillars of the 
home of Lee the dreamless couches of Union officers 
are spread as if their dust was to stand as a line of 
eternal sentries about the tenantless halls of the Con- 
federate chieftain. Twelve thousand warriors people 
this beautiful City of the Silent, and the Blue and 
the Gray sleep their long sleep together, — heroic 

2* 



14 THE SOUTH, 

enemies in the flame of battle, they have gained the 
peace that is to be unbroken. One-third of the 
whole number are the nameless tombs of the un- 
known, but their rest is undisturbed by the pity of 
the stranger, or the sorrowing of loved ones who 
mourn their unshrined dead. In one central vault 
the long-unearthed and scattered bones of over two 
thousand fallen soldiers have been gathered for sepul- 
chre. Who they were when they braved the deadly 
strife; whether they were friend or foe, none can 
tell. 

When the ravages of war had ceased, the govern- 
ment was but just to all in gleaning the battle-fields, 
where heroism such as was never surpassed in an- 
cient or modern conflicts had been displayed by 
North and South, and rescuinsf the remains of all 
from desecration. In the centre of one of the broad 
lawns which are dotted with the white records of the 
sacrifices of war, on a little eminence that greets the 
early rays of the morning sun, is an enclosure in 
which there are monuments differing from the plain 
and uniform slabs noting the sleepers beneath them. 
It is neatly paled, carefully preserved, and looks as 
if the offices of affection had been freely exercised 
in guarding the ashes that repose there. It is the 



ARLINGTON, THE HOME OF LEE. 



15 



family burial-ground of the Custises and the Lees, 
and it is made the special care of those who are 
charged with the keeping of this vast tenement of 
the silent. Here and there may be seen wooden 
slabs of uniform size, conspicuous because higher 
than the modest marble that shapes its faultless lines 
on the levelled green. They are the graves of the 
Confederates who were left on the sanguinary field 
or who died within the Union lines, and they rest 
surrounded by those who were their deadly foes in 
battle. Over two hundred acres are enclosed in the 
cemetery, embracing Arlington Mansion in the centre 
and the now terraced and beautiful lawn that made 
the prospect so pleasing from the portico, when look- 
ing to the distant Capital, or to the calm blue waters 
of the Potomac. The entrance to the walled enclo- 
sure is fitly ornamented by pillars from the old War 
and Navy Buildings, and weather-beaten guns and 
symmetrically-rounded mounds of shot mark the 
many hillocks which so grandly variegate the slopes 
of Arlington Heights. Close to the mansion is 
the rude and yet attractive open temple, where 
Decoration Day is celebrated. The rostrum is 
flanked by the old Grecian pillars from the dis- 
mantled Departments of War in Washington, and 



1 6 THE SOUTH. 

the ivy, the jessamine, and the wild flower mingle 
their tributes to the martyrs of Freedom with the 
once terrible but now decorative engines of war. 
Just outside the wall is Fort Whipple, the central 
figure of the great family of defensive works that 
once rested on these hills. Its embankments are 
levelled, its ditches filled up, and its cannon deposed, 
and where the soldier watched his shotted gun is 
a large, level centre square, with many neat build- 
ings about it. It is now the school of instruction 
for the signal and storm corps, and the epauletted 
and sworded gentry are training men to master the 
elements instead of teaching them the art of de- 
struction. All around it on the many commanding 
eminences may yet be seen the crumbling earth- 
works of the almost unbroken chain of fortifications 
that more than half surrounded Washington; but 
they are ungarrisoned now, and the drum-beat no 
longer breaks the morning silence on the Virginia 
side of the Potomac. 

The Arlington Mansion and its surrounding build- 
ings have suffered no changes since Lee went to 
Richmond in 1861, never to return to his home, save 
such as the ceaseless work of decay has wrought. 
The doors and windows have faded ; the pillars have 



ARLINGTON, THE HOME OF LEE. j^ 

decayed and scaled into ugliness ; the narrow, ill- 
balustraded stairway is worn and battered ; the empty 
rooms seem to give out more repulsive echoes of 
loneliness; the hearths are crumbling with weariness 
of vacancy, and it looks as if the hoot of the owl and 
the flap of the bat should break the painful solitude 
that reigns where George Washington Parke Custis 
and Robert E. Lee made one of the most brilliant 
and hospitable homes of Virginia. The soldier in 
blue, with an armless sleeve, has kept faithful vigil 
over this vast sepulchre for many years. He keeps 
the graves green, the flowers in bloom, the evergreens 
in shapely beauty, and all is neatness about the vener- 
able mansion that is now the central citadel of the 
voiceless thousands around it; but the storms of 
nearly fourscore winters have beaten against Arling- 
ton and their ravages have been left to tell their own 
stor}^ But of what moment is this desolation of 
all the attributes of home? Arlington is now only 
the mansion of the dead. Turn to every portico and 
window, and naught but the marks of the grave 
appear in contrast with the forest and its green sod ; 
and at stated distances around the walks to the very 
columns of the mansion are the tombs of officers, 
standing like mute but inexorable sentinels to make 



ig THE SOUTH, 

the Lees strangers to the home they so much rev- 
erenced. The vengeful hand of Stanton has left its 
imprint everywhere about Arlington in the ghastly 
army it has summoned to forbid the Confederate 
chieftain's return, and its work is irrevocable. Since 
then the conquered insurgent warrior and the im- 
placable War Minister have passed away. Off in 
the Virginia mountains, where the soldier of Arling- 
ton spent the evening of his life in usefulness, his 
dust rests within his college walls, and the repose that 
life refused to Stanton has been found in the grave. 
The beloved mistress of Arlington quickly followed 
her honored liege to that bourne whence no traveller 
returns, and the sons of Lee, who bravely but un- 
obtrusively followed his fortunes in war, now fill his 
chair at Washington and Lee University and till the 
soil of the peninsula, while his trooper kinsman, Fitz- 
Hugh Lee, is Governor of the mother Common- 
wealth. The great actors who have written the 
strange records of Arlington have gone to their 
final account, and with the Judge of all the living 
they have their reward. 



RICHMOND— VIRGINIA. 



The world moves, as Senator Brown recently 
advised the Georgia Legislature, and it moves in 
the South as well as elsewhere. It moves more 
slowly amidst the desolation the war left as the 
heritage of the South, as capital, labor, and enter- 
prise had to be created or learned anew, but when 
the iron-horse sweeps over the Long Bridge at the 
rate of a mile a minute, and hurries down the 
Potomac and across the Virginia plains to Rich- 
mond in three and a half hours from Washington, 
there is progress in the South. For years after the 
war it was a tedious day's journey from the national 
to the Virginia capital, but now it is merely a pleas- 
ant excursion from one city to the other and back 
between breakfast and dinner. And Virginia is 
moving, sluggishly it is true, but moving never- 
theless and in the right direction. Her homes are 
more heartsome and thrifty in their outward looks ; 

19 



20 THE SOUTH. 

her fields give the assurance of greater plenty, and 
the gradual revival of hopeful energy will eventually 
obliterate the blight of the bondman and the ter- 
rible throes of his deliverance. Fredericksburg looks 
brighter than I have seen it at any time during the 
last fifteen years, and but for the dotted hill hard 
by, recalling the widespread bereavement that came 
to North and South when Burnside and Lee belched 
forth their deadly thunders at each other, there would 
be nothing about the ancient village to denote the 
shock of the battle that made it almost one vast 
charnel-house. The flag that waves high over the 
mingled dust of the blue and the gray, tells the 
stranger of victor and vanquished ; but the fierce 
enemies who frowned upon each other behind their 
respective works, and the warriors themselves who 
met in the most sanguinary strife, are now so inter- 
mingled in the social and business circles of to-day 
that the war is remembered only as a horrible dream. 
As you approach Richmond the evidences of im- 
provement multiply, and there are few monuments to 
testify to the fearful struggle of four years that had 
the possession of this city for its objective-point. 
There is nothing to remind the traveller that more 
than two hundred thousand men fell in the struggle 



RICHMOND— VIRGINIA. 



21 



for Richmond. The signs of peace only are visible 
in the apparently comfortable community that sur- 
rounds the city and in the busy marts of trade 
exhibited in the narrow and sinuous streets which 
climb its broken hills. One pyramid monument of 
unhewn and mortarless stone, on an eminence in 
the northern suburb, is the general tribute of the 
survivors of the Lost Cause to their dead, and the 
statue of Jackson, a gift from sympathizing English- 
men, tells the whole story of Confederate heroism 
that is given in the poetry of the sculptor's chisel. 
Libby Prison has changed owners at the auction- 
block, and is now laden with the fruits of peaceful 
industry instead of housing a mass of sick and 
starving prisoners ; and Belle Isle no longer answers 
the babblings of the waters of the James with the 
hoarse murmurs of despairing men. The plough- 
share has levelled the net-work of battlements which 
environed the dual capital, and the rustling corn 
and the waving wheat gladden the heart where the 
sentinel pursued his steady beat and the shotted 
guns awaited the signal of death. The venerable 
State-House that stands on the pinnacle of the 
city, surrounded by beautiful shades and exquisite 
monuments of the fathers of the Republic, has 

3 



22 THE SOUTH. 

braved the storms of nearly a century. It was 
modelled by Jefferson after a Roman temple that 
pleased his curious eye when abroad, and it was 
erected before Washington was President, and when 
the eloquence of Henry was heard in the House 
of Delegates. It is rusted from foundation to 
dome, and every feature of it tells the story of 
neglected age; but what a history is interwoven 
with its blistered pillars and seamed walls ! Founded 
by those most illustrious in the annals of free 
government ; the oldest capital of the Union ; the 
centre of the omnipotent power of the Old Do- 
minion for a full generation ; the cradle in which 
the boasted Mother of Presidents reared her family 
of rulers; the temple of Confederate authority for 
four long years of sacrifice and waste ; next the 
forum where the enfranchised slave made laws for 
his discomfited master, and then the triumphant 
repudiator ran riot in its halls and scourged the 
dismembered Commonwealth with shame. 

The great stain on the Virginia of to-day is the re- 
pudiation frenzy that possessed her poverty-stricken 
people under the inspiration of cunning ambition. 
Unlike the other States which cast their fortunes 
with the Confederacy, Virginia has had no debt cast 



RICHMOND— VIRGINIA. 



23 



Upon her by the thieving adventurer. The carpet- 
bagger has never vexed her people by climbing into 
her places of high authority. Since reconstruction 
her government has been uniformly the creation of 
her own citizens, and her Executives have maintained 
the traditional integrity of old-time Virginia Gov- 
ernors. Her debt was all contracted before the war, 
and is in no degree the invention of the stranger. 
In the days of Virginia power and pride she built 
great arteries of trade by land and water, and but for 
the gnawing tooth of servile labor, she would have 
more than rivalled Pennsylvania in material progress 
and wealth, as she did in the mastery of her states- 
manship. But in an evil day the Confederacy 
reached out its arms, gathered the Old Dominion in 
its fatal embrace, and thus dated her decline and fall. 
Her territory was parted, and West Virginia was 
greeted as the deformed birth of civil war. The 
State became one vast battle-field, and the horrors of 
bloody fraternal strife were concentrated upon the 
people. Her lands were laid waste, her slave labor 
welcomed to freedom, her wealth destroyed, and the 
shadow of the avenging angel fell upon every house- 
hold. And when peace came her immediate re- 
sources were wellnigh destroyed, poverty was the 



24 



THE SOUTH. 



rule even where fortune and plenty had smiled, and 
debt had been sleepless in its accumulation. The 
rich mines and forests and natural highways of West 
Virginia had been taken from her, and her nearly 
fifty millions of debt and suspended interest con- 
fronted her. To her credit let it be said that even in 
those days of sorest trial for Virginians, none heard 
the voice of the repudiationist. Her first adminis- 
tration chosen by the vote of her people of both 
races equitably divided the common debt of the two 
Virginias by funding the principal and accumulated 
interest of* two-thirds of the whole amount as the 
debt of Virginia, and issuing certificates for the re- 
maining third as a claim against West Virginia. The 
interest coupons were made receivable for taxes, and 
all felt a just pride in the vindication of Virginia 
credit under what is known as the Walker Funding 
Bill. But taxes were heavy because there was little 
wherewith to pay them, and the apparent liquidation 
of one-third of the debt by an order on West Vir- 
ginia opened the way for a repudiation movement 
that has finally triumphed over all the traditions and 
pride of Virginia integrity. Disappointed ambition 
seized upon the easy way to pay debts by repudiating 
them, and carried the issue to the hustings, where 



RICHMOND— VIRGINIA. 



25 



the exactions of poverty made men hesitate between 
duty and dishonor. The funding act was defeated 
by legislative embarrassments, although repudiation 
was disclaimed by all. Then came Mr. Hugh Mc- 
Culloch, who proposed to fund the whole debt of 
about thirty-two millions in forty-year bonds, to bear 
three per cent, for ten years, four per cent, for fifteen 
years, and five per cent, thereafter, and the coupons 
to be receivable for taxes. 

The bill was passed and the eight millions re- 
quired by the act were funded within the time 
prescribed ; but General Mahone then entered the 
field as a full-fledged repudiationist, divided the 
white Democrats by appeals to ambition and fac- 
tion, flattered the colored voters into his ranks by 
lavish promises of a free ballot without any taxes 
whatever, commanded the aid of the few white 
Republican leaders by open barter of office and 
political success, and the McCuUoch funding scheme 
was arrested by the growth of repudiation and the 
peril of trusting the solemn faith of the once proud 
Old Dominion. By the consolidation of the colored 
vote and the aid of the Republican leaders as a 
political expedient, Mahone carried the Legislature, 
elected himself to the United States Senate, deposed 



26 THE SOUTH. 

every debt-paying State official within the reach of 
the legislative power, chose repudiation County 
Judges in most of the districts of the State, passed 
an act distinctly repudiating all of the debt over 
twenty millions, and carried an amendment to the 
Constitution removing all tax qualifications for elec- 
tors. Riddleberger, the author of the repudiation 
measure in the Legislature, logically followed Ma- 
hone to the United States Senate; but the arts of 
the demagogue win only perishable triumphs, and 
Virginia has re-asserted herself by the election of 
Lee as Chief Magistrate, and her repudiation Senators 
will soon seek the shades of grateful oblivion. The 
stain of repudiation cannot be effaced; its work 
cannot be undone, but the tide of public dishonesty 
has been arrested in its steady march toward uni- 
versal repudiation, and the venerable Commonwealth 
will build anew on the racked foundations of State 
pride and honor. The special message of Governor 
Lee sent to the Legislature in February last, tells 
the whole story. The Riddleberger settlement of 
the debt will not be disturbed, for the simple reason 
that any administration or any party attempting to 
renew the agitation, would be hopelessly over- 
thrown. It was that obvious truth that compelled 



RICHMOND— VIRGINIA. 



27 



Governor Lee, who earnestly opposed every form 
of repudiation, to say in his message that "if the 
creditors could be fully informed of the true state 
of affairs, they would accept the provisions of 
the Riddleberger bill." But for the defeat of the 
open Repudiationists at the late election, there is 
little reason to doubt that the hesitation of the 
creditors to accept the Riddleberger basis, and the 
recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United 
States, would have been made the pretext for another 
and more sweeping plunge into dishonor. 

It is due to the people of Virginia to say that 
it was not the property-owners and tax-payers, as 
a rule, who were repudiators. A fraction of the 
Democrats separated from the regular organization 
under the leadership of Mahone. The readjustment 
of the debt was only their nominal aim, while the 
control of the State, the partition of its offices, and 
the punishment of the so-called Bourbons were the 
real purposes in view. They allied the whole colored 
vote with them by cunningly devised appeals to their 
cupidity and ambition. The negroes, as a rule, do 
not pay taxes on property, but they were taxed 
with all non-property-holding whites one dollar per 
capita as a prerequisite for voting, and the capitation 



28 THE SOUTH. 

tax went to the free school fund that is devoted to 
the equal education of whites and blacks. The 
repudiationists appealed to the colored voters by 
proposing to abolish the capitation tax, and thus 
enable all to vote without the payment of taxes 
at all. Thus the eighty thousand colored voters 
were practically secured for repudiation, although 
they were repudiating their own free schools by 
their own act; and thus, mainly by the vote of 
non-taxpayers and adventurers in politics, the debt 
of Virginia was repudiated against the protest of a 
large majority of the actual tax-payers of the State. 
Those who must pay whatever debt shall be paid 
are not the repudiationists, but numbers and corrupt 
combinations will often defeat property and honesty. 



THE SISTER CAROLINAS. 



The New South ! We have heard that expression 
many times during the last twenty years, but it never 
had the meaning that it has to-day. We had a New 
South when the war closed, — a South with slavery 
violently abolished, and with poverty, desolation, and 
wide-spread despair the heritage of her people, and 
a South unschooled in progress, save as the severe 
necessities of war had impressed their lessons. We 
talked of the New South again when reconstruction 
had completed its work in the tempest of partisan and 
sectional passion, but it was the greater sweep of 
desolation of peace that followed the desolation of 
war. Then came the New South, when intelligence, 
integrity, and property gained the mastery in local 
government. It was achieved only after many years 
of bewildering debauchery and waste in authorit}^, 
and of wanton humiliation to all who refused homage 
to ignorance and theft; but it came with the first 

29 



30 THE SOUTH. 

bright silver lining to the dark clouds of war and 
reconstruction, and it dated the beginning of the 
deliverance of the South from the fearfully retribu- 
tive fruits of civil war. The South is often censured 
for its ready submission to the memorable electoral 
crime of 1876; but had all the interests of home, of 
property, of peace and self-respect appealed to the 
North as they appealed to the South, when the State 
governments of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisi- 
ana trembled in the balance of fraud, there would 
have been quite as prompt submission to a fraudulent 
presidential title north of the Potomac as there was 
south of its historic banks. And when it is remem- 
bered that to have refused submission would have 
been stamped as a supplementary rebellion against 
authority under color of law, and against the army 
with Grant at its head, there was sound discretion 
in the submissive South. That monstrous electoral 
fraud fixed its own infamy indelibly in the annals of 
the nation, by recognizing the Democratic Governors 
elected on the same ticket with Tildcn in the three 
States that were despoiled of their electoral votes, and 
there is a measure of historic justice in the re-election 
of Vice-President Hendricks that would have been 
rounded out in the grandest completeness, had not 



THE SISTER CAROLINAS. 3J 

the infirmities of time dimmed the lustre of achieve- 
ments in the Hfe of Samuel J. Tilden. The New 
South of to-day would have dated eight years earlier 
had not the decisive judgment of the nation been 
overthrown in crime, but there is now vastly riper 
fitness for improving all the logical advantages of the 
disenthralment of the South than there could have 
been in 1877. 

There are few, even among the more intelligent 
people of the North, who can justly appreciate the 
New South of to-day. Only those who have freely 
mingled with the Southern people during the last 
fifteen years, and carefully noted their condition and 
the restraints and obstacles which confronted them in 
every effort at manly progress, can understand the 
full meaning of the words, the New South, as they 
are understood to day. They have a practical mean- 
ing that only the South can understand, and yet they 
inspire no single hope or wish to undo that which 
has been done. The Southern eye brightens, and the 
Southern face beams with hope, as the future of the 
South is discussed, but there is no turning with wist- 
ful eyes to the theories of the past. The Old South 
is dead. It has passed away ; it is buried ; it is for- 
gotten, save as old memories and old pride cast their 



32 



THE SOUTH. 



flitting shadows over the better present and brighter 
future. I have heard no Southern man talk of the 
past as a guide for the future. A new generation has 
come from the cradle to manhood since Sumter was 
fired upon, and they, with the surviving Southern sol- 
diery, understand the irrevocable arbitrament of the 
sword. And they understand, also, that it would be 
midsummer madness to turn back to the theories of 
the Old South, if it were within the limits of possi- 
billity to do so. Even South Carolina would not 
now return to slavery if it could. A large majority 
of her white leaders, and an overwhelming majority 
of the white people, would vote and battle against the 
restoration of black bondage. They would be glad 
to limit their prerogatives of citizenship, as would the 
people of Pennsylvania under like circumstances ; but 
their inherent pride of State forbids it, although fully 
possessing the power, because it would dwarf the 
Commonwealth in the councils of the nation and 
rank her with the insignificant States of the Union. 
In the free mingling with the representative men of 
the Carolinas, including white and black, I have 
heard no hope or wish or fear expressed as to re- 
actionary movements in those States. In South 
Carolina, where secession was part of school educa- 



THE SISTER CAROLINAS. 33 

tioii more than half a century ago, and where the 
stern patriotism of a Jackson was needed to prevent 
nullification from breeding sectional war before many 
of the actors of the late war were born, there is no 
shade of a shadow of reactionary movement ; and the 
man who attempted it would be hopelessly over- 
thrown. To assume that they have forgotten their 
love for their lost cause ; their veneration for its 
heroes, their reverence for its dead, and their sorrow 
for its failure, would be to assume that they are more 
or less than human ; but that they are thoroughly 
assimilated with the new duties that n^w occasions 
have prescribed, and are in sincere and hearty accord 
with the new hopes and new achievements which 
now invite them, is the honest truth. It can no 
longer be a matter of speculation, as the revolution 
in national power has thoroughly tested the aims and 
efforts of the Southern people, and they put to shame 
reckless demagogues who have fanned the embers of 
sectional strife long years after the defeated and im- 
poverished South has been struggling only for the 
right to retrieve its countless misfortunes. 

It is startling to compare the growth of Virginia 
with the Carolinas since the war. It is true that 
Virginia bore more than her share of the brunt of 



34 



THE SOUTH. 



the battle, as her territory is crowded with historic 
fields of sanguinary conflict and much of her lands 
were laid waste ; but her loss by war was not more 
than the loss of South Carolina, and not so much 
considering the value of emancipated slaves. Vir- 
ginia never drank the bitter dregs of carpet-bag rule, 
and her credit was never wasted by the profligacy 
of political adventurers. She never had a dollar of 
debt, outside of the universally rejected Confederate 
obligations, that was not the creation of the Old 
Dominion in the exercise of her own proud and 
deliberate authority. To-day Virginia is the only 
State in the South that has repudiated her own debt 
created by her own white people before the war, 
and she is in the rear of both the Carolinas in the 
growth of legitimate industry, business, and wealth. 
But if Virginia escaped the desolating tread of the 
carpet-bagger, she has inflicted upon herself a wound 
scarcely less vital than the worst of wounds which 
yet scar the other reconstructed States. When she 
should have profited by her naturally advantageous 
relations with the capital and industry of the North, 
and could have made her mountains, so richly studded 
with wealth, and her vast water-powers, so easy of 
access, fruitful sources of enduring prosperity, she 



THE SISTER CAROL INAS. ^c 

turned upon herself with suicidal hands, thrice re- 
pudiated her thrice accepted debt, effaced honor from 
the jewels of the once proud Commonwealth, and 
made capital and industry and integrity shun her 
as the valley of death. She will grow and yet be 
prosperous and great in spite of herself, but she 
should to-day be in the front of Southern growth, 
instead of lagging behind the States which had to 
recover from the . double curse of war and of the 
empire of theft. North Carolina is now single from 
the other reconstructed States in having attained, 
solely by the efforts of her own people, a higher 
degree of general prosperity than was ever before 
attained in her history. She has a more prosperous 
and thrifty people to-day than at any period of the 
past, and there is more capital employed and less 
debt. State and individual, than at any time in the 
last half-century. Texas has surpassed the old 
North State because of her large influx of immi- 
gration and wealth; but North Carolina has fewer 
foreigners and a more completely homogeneous 
population than any other State of the Union. 
Since the rescue of the State from the tempest of 
profligacy that swept over it after the war under 
the Holden government, the taxes have steadily 



36 



THE SOUTH. 



diminished until they are only nominal, and the 
schools have increased until they proffer education 
to every child in the Commonwealth, regardless of 
color. Her legitimate debt is steadily reduced ; her 
treasury has a large surplus ; her humane institu- 
tions, conducted with equal care and outlay for 
both races, are monuments of credit; her public 
improvements have kept pace with the growing 
wants of her people; her authority reflects the 
pride of the State in its stainless integrity, and 
thrift and content are the common blessings of her 
people. 

For this exceptional record there are many able 
and true men to whom North Carolina is indebted ; 
but it is no injustice to any to say that to no one 
is she so much indebted as to Thomas J. Jarvis, the 
late Governor. His term of six years, ended only 
by the mandate of the Constitution, has brought 
the State to the largest measure of prosperity ever 
known in all her past, and there is not a son of 
North Carolina who does not share in the general 
pride of a more than rehabilitated Commonwealth. 
When it is considered that North Carolina has every 
important mineral within her borders, from gold 
to iron; that she has every variety of soil for every 



THE SISTER CAROLINAS. 37 

variety of crops, from wheat to cotton ; that she 
has every variety of ch'mate, from the sunny 
Southern coast to the chills of the highest peak 
of the Appalachian range ; that she has water-power 
enough in a single river to spin and weave the 
whole cotton of the South, and that her lands are 
nearly as cheap and her climate better than the 
West, — when these facts are weighed in the scale 
of intelligence, the momentous meaning of a New 
South, with sectional tranquillity assured, may be 
understood in the North as it is now understood 
in the Carolinas, And South Carolina is little 
behind her sister. Georgia doubtless ranks next 
to North Carolina in the race for recovered pros- 
perity, but South Carolina is close upon the heels 
of both, and with graver obstacles to overcome. 
Her loss in property by the war, including the 
property value of slaves, was greater in proportion 
to the population than that of any State in the 
Union, and the very refinement of carpet-bag theft 
and humiliation was reserved as her destiny. She 
had not only the graver problem to solve of an 
overwhelming majority of the most ignorant blacks 
suddenly clothed with every attribute of citizen- 
ship, and with scarcely the shadow of property or 



38 



THE SOUTH. 



appreciated responsibility, but she had the deepest- 
rooted Southern sectionalism to master and the 
teachings and traditions of generations to unlearn. 
But the Palmetto State has made the grandest 
progress during the last eight years, and omitting 
wealth reckoned for slaves, she is richer to-day 
than ever before, and with abundant evidence that 
the era of development, of intelligent business 
progress, and of rapidly multiplying wealth is just 
beginning its great work. It is naturally the richest 
planting and agricultural State of the whole Union, 
without any exception. It has the best soil, with 
every advantage for its most profitable cultivation, 
of any part of the South ; and the people who 
have been born upon it and who have lived in 
the luxury of superabundance and again felt the 
poverty of helplessness, are just now mastering the 
problem that a Yankee, compelled to lie awake at 
night to invent a method to get his pork and beans 
or pumpkin pie, would have mastered in an hour. 
There is no other part of the South except Florida 
where so little labor will produce so much, but with 
the richest uplands skirting the Blue Ridge, and with 
three-fourths of the State adapted to corn, South 
Carolina has ever been a buyer of bread. She should 



THE SISTER CAROLINAS. 



39 



have thrice her present population and be able to feed 
it from her own fields without impairing her more 
valuable crops of cotton and rice, and every pound 
of her cotton could be more profitably spun and 
woven on her own superabundant water-powers, than 
any other place on the continent. The New South 
whispers of these achievements, and that is why the 
sister Carolinas are more hopeful and more pros- 
perous to-day than at any time since they summoned 
the angel of sorrow to shadow the land. 



COLUMBIA— SOUTH CAROLINA. 



CpLUMBiA was the favored city of the South be- 
fore the war. It was the special pride of South Caro- 
hna, and South CaroHna was the special pride of the 
whole distinctive Southern sentiment. It is a vast 
village of old-time planters' homes, with their heart- 
some shades, large verandas, wide halls, climbing 
flowers and vines, and with the live-oak to cool the 
streets and the ever-blossoming magnolia to perfume 
the atmosphere. Its broad avenues, excepting on 
one short business street, are almost forests of green 
shade in summer, and winter is softened into our 
Northern spring. Until Sherman came with ven- 
geance in his track, there was no more beautiful city 
on the continent ; but the healing of twenty years has 
not restored the savage waste of war. Blackened and 
crumbling piles of what once were attractive homes 
or public edifices yet remain in isolated instances as 
monuments of the fearful atonement the cradle of 
40 



COL UMBIA— SO UTH CA R OL IN A. 



41 



disunion has made for rebellion against the Republic. 
Nor was the destructive march of Sherman the great- 
est of South Carolina's calamities. After him came 
the scourge of the carpet-bagger, and for nearly a 
decade he revelled in the luxury of the thieving 
spoiler; and it was not until the cup of humiliation 
had been drained to its wtry dregs that the long 
dream of Southern omnipotence and of a Southern 
Confederacy vanished like a hideous phantom. Half 
a century ago the dream of the dismemberment of the 
Republic and the erection of an independent Confed- 
eracy, to be governed by the distinctly defined ruling 
class, and to be sustained by the distinctly defined 
servile producing class, first mingled with the slum- 
bers of the Palmetto State, and thenceforth it was the 
disunion leaven of South Carolina that leavened the 
whole South and prepared it for the bloody achieve- 
ments and failures which culminated at Appomattox 
in 1865. Notwithstanding the apparently crushing 
blow that Jackson gave to Calhoun and nullification 
fifty years ago, disunion was taught with ceaseless, 
subtle energy, and it was here that the first secession 
ordinance was passed, and it was in the harbor of 
South Carolina that the first hostile gun was fired at 
the flag. The assault and capture of Fort Sumter 



42 THE SOUTH. 

made Columbia wild with rejoicing; the sequel came 
when the flames kissed each other from home to 
home and street fo street as Sherman passed, and 
the bondman became the ruler of the proud Palmetto 
planters. 

A painful history may be studied by a walk around 
the ideal capital of the South. Long before the war 
it was the hope of South Carolinians that separation 
from the North must come sooner or later, and that 
Columbia would be the capital and centre of South- 
ern power. It pervaded not only the lordly planters 
who had their troops of docile slaves, but the poor 
white man, who struggled in ignorance and poverty 
by the side of the often more favored bondman, 
caught the inspiration of his superiors, and how 
stubbornly he maintained it was fearfully attested on 
many battle-fields. Like the scarcely understood 
hope of the Russian serf, that his people must one 
day worship at the cradle of the church in Constanti- 
nople, the white serf of the South was enthused with 
the no better understood hope of worshipping South- 
ern omnipotence at the cradle of disunion in South 
Carolina. It was this dream that founded the unfin- 
ished capitol in this city. While planned ostensibly 
as the capitol of South Carolina, on a scale of gran- 



COL UMBIA—SO UTH CAR OLINA. 



43 



deur worthy of Greece or Rome in their best days, it 
was the unwritten law and the unconfessed hope of 
the State that the Palmetto capitol must be worthy of 
the future Confederacy as the temple of its laws, and 
for years before the clash of disunion arms was heard, 
the expected capitol of the slave empire was patiently 
progressing. It is colossal in size, and it was con- 
ceived in a degree of architectural magnificence be- 
fore which every State capitol in the Union paled 
into obscurity. It had been raised to the square, 
ready for its richly ornamented copings and roof, 
when war arrested its construction, but enough had 
been done to portray its marvellous elegance. On 
the exquisitely carved marble facings of the four 
fronts of the building are hewn niches for the statues 
of the fathers of the new Confederacy, and artistic 
circles for commemorating in bas-relief those who 
deserved distinction above their co-laborers. But 
two of them are finished, and they present the pro- 
files of McDuffie and Hayne; and who will fill the 
many vacant places, now that the whole dream has 
perished, some future generation must decide. In 
the poverty and desolation wrought by war and 
carpet-bag profligacy, there is no hope for the com- 
pletion of this imposing structure by those now in 



44 THE SOUTH. 

active control of the State. The era of severe econ- 
omy has of necessity followed the desolating tread 
of the adventurer, and the unsightly picture of dilap- 
idation and waste is presented by the building that 
was once the pride of every South Carolinian. The 
beautiful walls are stained and their seams opened by 
the ceaseless ravages of time, and the rude temporary 
finish made under the reign of the stranger, to echo 
the voice of the slave as he enacted laws for his 
master, adds to the general dreariness that surrounds 
Capitol Hill. Fluted or half-finished columns of im- 
posing dimensions are scattered about the grounds; 
elaborately wrought massive granite caps are rusting 
beside the walls which await them, and the debris of 
the finest Italian marble tells the story of the mag- 
nificence that was designed for this central altar of 
Southern worship. Two monuments stand in the 
unbecoming rudeness that surrounds them. One 
tells how the North and the South once fought under 
the same flag in Mexico, by an elegant bronze pal- 
metto-tree, on which is engraved the fallen heroes 
who overthrew the legions of Santa Anna, and the 
other, " erected by the ladies of South Carolina," tells 
in mute but eloquent marble how the Confederate 
warrior braved and died for his cause. 



COLUMBIA— SOUTH CAROLINA. 



45 



There is no State in the South that has more thor- 
oughly learned the true lesson of the war than South 
Carolina. It has all of Southern pride surviving its 
sorrow and desolation ; the traditions of its people 
are as sacred as ever, as they must be with men who 
are worth national fellowship. It is not a convert to 
the wisdom of free labor or the enfranchisement of 
freedmen ; but it does thoroughly understand that 
the traditions and customs of the past belong to the 
past, and that civil rights are as sacred for the lowly 
as for the mightiest in the land. The two races are 
more nearly in harmony in South Carolina than in 
any of the other slave States, and I believe that there 
is more kind feeling for the colored man, as a fellow- 
citizen, in this State than in any of the border States. 
Wade Hampton made the first successful experiment 
in dividing the colored vote in 1876, and that ended 
the rigid colored line in South Carolina. The col- 
ored leaders and their fellow carpet-baggers had 
plundered the Commonwealth, impoverished both 
whites and blacks, and the helpless freedman turned 
to the plantation and to his old master for corn and 
bacon as a deliberate and wise choice of evils. Since 
then, with the exception of the coast region, there 
has been as cordial harmony and mutuality of in- 



46 THE SOUTH. 

terest, in both politics and business, between the 

whites and blacks, as is common in communities of 

one race, and the men who are ruling the State to-day 

are as jealous of the rights of the colored people as 

they are of their own. Schools have been multiplied 

in every county with the most scrupulous equality 

of educational advantages between the races ; over 

/ eleven hundred colored teachers are now teaching in 

^ the colored schools in the pay of the State, and 

/ Democratic colored Representatives represent white 

constituents. 

While the general harmony of the two races is 
assured in South Carolina, there is one black cancer 
on the sea-coast that is a fearful hindrance to the 
advancement of the colored race, and a fearful temp- 
tation to intimidation and fraud on the part of the 
whites. Beaufort has some six hundred white voters 
and more than as many thousand colored voters. If 
the colored population of that section was as intelli- 
gent as even the proverbially ignorant field-hands of 
the interior and upland sections, there would be some 
reasonable solution of the vexatious problem. If the 
rice and sea-island plantation negroes were the equal 
of their colored brethren in other portions of the 
State, they could assert their own rights with some 



COLUMBIA— SOUTH CAROLINA. ^y 

degree of intelligence ; but they are the most hope- 
lessly ignorant and debased of the race on the con- 
tinent, and are incapable of improvement. They live 
in the miasmas of the rice and island cotton plan- 
tations, where to tarry is often death to the white 
man, and generation after generation have grown up 
without intercourse with the whites, entirely without 
facilities for culture, and they are ignorant to a de- 
gree that makes them incapable even of speaking 
an intelligible language. They have the natural do- 
cility of the negro, and they are like so many sheep 
in the shambles for politicians on both sides. Some- 
times they are rallied and voted indefinitely by un- 
scrupulous leaders, as they defy individual recog- 
nition, and again they are terrorized by cunning 
Democrats, who well understand that a whisper to 
the fears of these poor creatures makes them dream 
of unspeakable horrors. This element is the only 
one that is fraught with peril to both races in South 
Carolina, and I have heard of no promising method 
for correcting it ; but South Carolina is about to open 
on a long career of peaceful progress, in which the 
whites and the blacks will advance together, and she 
points to the sacredly maintained credit of the State, 
to the premium commanded for her securities in the 



48 THE SOUTH. 

Northern market, to the Democratic constitutional 
provision fixing free and equal education beyond 
the caprice of Legislatures, to the diffusion of in- 
dustry by small tenantries, to the rapid increase of 
industrial products, and to the general tranquillity of 
all races and conditions of people, as conclusive evi- 
dence that there is a new South Carolina, with new 
duties honestly accepted, and with a new destiny of 
which the nation will soon be justly proud. 



CHARLESTON. 



There is no city on the continent that is more 
fragrant of song and story, or of field and forum, 
than is Charleston, the metropoHs of the Pahnetto 
State. Here CavaHer and Puritan were side by side 
in founding the new empire beyond the Western sea 
more than two centuries ago, and their altars remain 
among the noted landmarks of the earliest settle- 
ment. St. Philip's Church gathered its worshippers 
of i68i to their devotions, and its two thickly-settled 
cemeteries, with their quaint and crumbling monu- 
ments to the dead, brightened by the magnolia, the 
live-oak, the evergreen, and the beauty and fragrance 
of perpetual flowers, make the romance of history 
lustrous. There, among the earliest sleepers of the 
colonists of the Lord Proprietors, fitly reposes the 
dust of Calhoun, whose square brick tomb, marked 
by a plain marble slab, is shaded by a large magno- 
lia that stands as a central guardian pf the dead of 

S"" 49 



50 



THE SOUTH. 



five generations. St. Michael's Church has heard the 
suppHcations of four generations, and its yet noted 
chimes summoned the multitude to prayer and praise 
half a generation before the Revolution. Its bells 
were taken by the British in 1782, shipped back to 
England as trophies of war, again bought and re- 
shipped in 1783, and rang out their sweet music 
from the old belfry until the black cloud of civil war 
came in 1861. They were so highly prized as living 
and speaking mementos of the founders of the proud 
Southern Commonwealth that they were shipped to 
the interior city of Columbia for safety, where they 
met the fury of Sherman's avenging army, and were 
made voiceless by the flames which desolated that 
beautiful capital. The tuneless metal was reshipped 
to England, recast in copy and quantity by the same 
establishment that had furnished them a century 
before, and in 1867 they rang out the same sweet 
chimes which had sung the first sacred belfry song 
of the Colonies, The Huguenots reared their altar 
two full centuries ago, and their church has twice 
been destroyed by fire ; but its unmixed Gothic archi- 
tecture, neat finish, and many tablets in commemo- 
ration of its founders, as presented to-day, fully pre- 
pare the visitor for the fact that it is the only church 



CHARLESTON. 



51 



on the continent that yet adheres strictly to the Hu- 
guenot worship. 

Charleston is at once a city of energy and decay, 
but its energy is in the business channels, where it is 
most needed, and its decay is in its buildings, where 
coming thrift can one day arrest it. Its generally 
beautiful, balconied and pillared homes are exter- 
nally faded and musty from neglect, but there is 
beauty even in the long untouched, moss-grown 
walls and venerable ornaments which tell the story 
of the strange sacrifices the people have suffered. 
In December, 1861, soon after civil war had begun 
its march of destruction, a fire swept over a large 
portion of the city and consumed six millions of 
property. The four years of desperate, deadly fra- 
ternal strife that followed gave no time or means to 
repair the waste, and when war ended in 1865 no 
community in the South was more exhausted or 
more desolated than this people that had been to the 
fore-front in inviting and precipitating the unnatural 
conflict. Nor did the return of peace open the way 
to retrieve the unspeakable misfortunes of war, for 
when the sword was sheathed and the flags of con- 
tending armies were furled, there came a visitation 
even more terrible and destructive than war. The 



52 



THE SOUTH. 



adventurer, the thief, the carpet-bagger enthroned 
themselves in the chaos, and there was a decade of 
waste, demorahzation, and paralysis that sapped the 
vitals of every resource and hope of the people. 
The proud patrimony of a great Commonwealth was 
ineffaceably stained with dishonor; the ignorant freed- 
men were publicly invited to despoil their former 
masters by theft and oppression, and for ten years 
the plunderers of high and low degree held ceaseless 
carnival amidst the hopeless poverty of every honest 
home. The whole machinery of government, in- 
cluding the Executive, the Legislature, and the 
Courts, was made the mere agent of adventurers to 
rob and shame the State, and popular elections were 
but a mockery of the voters. At last relief came in 
the memorable struggle of 1876, when peace was 
born in the throes of smothered revolution at Co- 
lumbia, and the considerate student of the decade of 
carpet-bag infamy that deepened and widened the 
desolation and sacrifices of war, will judge in gen- 
erous justice the passive assent to the electoral fraud 
of 1876 that gave South Carolina, Florida, and Lou- 
isiana home rule. It was thus fifteen years after the 
sorrows and sacrifice of war began, and ten years 
after the tread of hostile armies had ceased, that 



CHARLESTON, 



53 



Charleston began the work of rehabilitation, and 
even the presumably more energetic and versatile 
people of the North, with like prostration, wasted 
resources, and sluggish surroundings, would have 
progressed little if any better than has the city of 
Charleston. Instead of repining over the countless 
woes which befell them in the discomfiture of war, 
the emancipation of slaves, the destruction of wealth, 
and a revolution in popular government to which 
they were not only strangers, but trained to mis- 
understand, they have rapidly rebuilt their com- 
merce, enlarged their industries, quickened their sur- 
rounding producers, and entered the race to regain 
their position and wealth with a heroism and steady 
endurance that have accomplished marvellous results. 
But it will require years to restore the thrift that 
reared the beautiful homes and churches and schools 
and other monuments of wealth and culture by 
which old Charleston marked her magnificent pro- 
gress, and there is pardonable decay in the external 
signs of the city while energy and growing advance- 
ment are visible in all the channels of business enter- 
prise. There is now unclouded peace and trust 
between the North and the South ; the advent of a 
national revolution in politics has dissipated the last 



54 THE SOUTH. 

hope of the partisan demagogue and the last fear of 
the sensitive capitalist, as it has proved that with a 
President elected by the solid vote of the South there 
is thoroughly loyal devotion not only to the Union 
but also to the irrevocable judgments of the war. If 
the administration of Cleveland were to fail in all its 
confidently expected governmental reforms, it would 
still leave one priceless blessing to the whole nation 
in the absolute and staple faith it has established 
between the material interests of the two sections of 
the country. 

Standing on the Battery, with the vast expanse of 
waters leading to the sea before you, and the most 
attractive homes of the city flanking the little park 
on the other side, Fort Sumter is visible nearly four 
miles away, and its sister forts, remembered as Castle 
Pinckney and Fort Moultrie, may also be dimly seen 
in the distance; but all have ceased to have frown- 
ing battlements. Castle Pinckney has been trans- 
formed into peaceful pursuits ; Fort Moultrie remains 
with its guns dismantled and its bulwark razed, and 
Fort Sumter, about which crowd such a wealth of 
historic memories, quietly nestles in the water mid- 
way between Morris and Sullivan Islands, without 
sign of the grim purposes of war. Instead of the 



CHARLESTON, 



55 



batteries which belched forth their harmless shot 
and shell in obedience to the orders of Anderson, a 
light-house relieves the squatty summit of the mem- 
orable fortress to light the path of the commerce 
and wealth of peace. It was in this city that re- 
bellion against the Nation had its birth ; it was here 
that the first hostile gun was fired against the flag, 
and it was here that the last and saddest sacrifices of 
war were felt. The people of South Carolina are no- 
thing if not heroic, and right or wrong,^they are sin- 
cere, earnest, and brave. It was in Charleston that 
rebellion was organized againt the Lord Proprietors 
of King Charles in 1719; it was in Charleston that 
rebellion against King George began in 1774; it 
was in Charleston that rebellion attempted nullifi- 
cation of the revenue laws in 1831, and it was in 
Charleston that rebellion culminated in civil war in 
1 861. The heroic qualities of the Cavalier and the 
Puritan have written these momentous chapters in 
the annals of American history, and the same heroic 
qualities are now leading in the restoration of the 
South to prosperity, and on a basis that must speedily 
give the reconstructed States a degree of substantial 
wealth and power that was never dreamed of before 
the war. On the 12th of April, 1861, when the first 



56 



THE SOUTH. 



gun was fired from Moultrie at Sumter, it was not 
only the proclamation of fraternal war, but it was 
the signal-gun of a political, industrial, and social 
revolution in the noblest and strongest government 
of the world. Like all such revolutions, it brought 
sad bereavements and fearful sacrifice. On the i8th 
of February, 1865, the next proclamation in the irre- 
sistible progress of the great revolution was made 
as the signal-gun of Sherman ordered the advance 
upon the then defenceless city. The, next procla- 
mation of the progress of the ripening fruits of the 
seed sown in the fierce tempest of battle was when 
Wade Hampton conquered anarchy at Columbia and 
joined his old battle-scarred friends and foes in the 
Senate, and now all the well-springs of fraternity, 
of peace, and of united energies are hastening the 
grand consummation. This history is impressed 
here on every side. The beautiful homes which 
dot the isle where once Fort Moultrie frowned ; the 
mission of peace that has its altar on the crown of 
Sumter; the levelled intrenchments which once bris- 
tled with guns in the wide crescent of defences on the 
sea-side of the city ; the Confederate monument that 
tells of the lost Moultrie, and divides the sympathies 
of the people with the equally beautiful monument of 



CHARLESTON. 



57 



Sergeant Jasper, who restored Moultrie's flag in the 
hottest of a Revolutionary battle, and the Confederate 
Home, where the maimed soldier who fought for 
the stars and bars, hoists and lowers the stars and 
stripes with rising and setting sun, all tell the story 
of the beneficent revolution that has been wrought, 
and of the inevitable grandeur and prosperity of the 
reunited American people. In no other nation of 
history could nearly two millions of brave reapers 
in the terrible harvest of death have been remanded 
to the channels of peaceful industry without a jar in 
Sfovernment, commerce, or trade, and it is even a 
nobler tribute to the people of North and South that 
the soldiers of both the blue and the gray have been 
the manly conservators of peace and order since 
they retired from the conflicts of matchless heroism. 
There is peace and trust throughout the land ; the 
scars of war are being fast effaced, and the new 
generation, with its new South and new North, will 
worship the most beneficent government and witness 
the most prosperous people of the earth. 



GEORGIA— THE EMPIRE STATE OF THE 
SOUTH. 



Georgia is the Empire State of the South. 
Nature made her so by a wealth of soil and mines 
that is unequalled in any of the coast or Gulf States 
south of Virginia, excepting Alabama, and her peo- 
ple have been proverbial for more than ordinary 
Southern progress. The blight of slavery has made 
her farms unsightly and hindered the development 
of her ruling class, but Georgia has ever been the 
conservative centre of the cotton region, and thrift 
and comfort have been more generally diffused 
here than in any of the other slave Commonwealths. 
There are more small farms than in any other part 
of the cotton region, and the local business centres 
wear a healthier aspect than is common in Virginia 
and the Carolinas, while Atlanta has every appear- 
ance of being the legitimate offspring of Chicago. 
There is nothing of the Old South about it, and 
58 



GEORGIA— EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH. ^^ 

all the traditions of the old-time South, which are 
made poetical to dignify effete pride and logical 
poverty, have no place in the men of the present 
in the young and thriving Gate City. There must 
be old regulation Southerners in this region, but 
they have either died untimely in despair, or they 
have drifted into the current and moved on with the 
world around them. The young men are not the 
dawdling, pale-faced, soft-handed effeminates which 
were so often visible in the nurslings of the slave. 
They have keen, expressive eyes ; their faces are 
bronzed ; their hands are often the tell-tales of labor ; 
their step is elastic and their habits are energetic. 
They bear unmistakable signs of culture ; but it is 
the culture that came with self-reliance, and it is 
valued, because it cost them sacrifice, invention, and 
effort. They have learned that 'Hiardness ever of 
hardiness is mother," and if the young men of 
Georgia who have grown up since the war do not 
soon assert themselves and make a most whole- 
some shaking up of the old fossil ideas and dreams 
of the South, every present indication must prove 
delusive. With a city like Atlanta, that has not 
a vestige of old Southern ways about it, in the 
very heart of the State and the temple of her laws, 



6o THE SOUTH. 

it is simply impossible that such keen and powerful 
pulsations can fail to quicken the whole people. 
You hear no curses of the blacks from idlers in 
Atlanta. They understand that the negro is away 
behind them ; that his future is a doubtful one, and 
they vote him and vote with him; open schools of 
all grades for him, on equal footing with the white; 
trade with him in politics and in business, and 
move on in their own way without leaving obstacles 
in the path of the black man or caring much 
whether he advances or falls in the race. They 
know that the negro will never rule the State or 
anything else; that he won't rule himself, and 
while really cherishing more sincere and practical 
kindness for him than most of those who bubble 
over with sympathy for him at long range in the 
North, they have no political or business warfare 
with him, and he votes as freely in Georgia as he 
does in Pennsylvania. 

There are more potent civilizers in Georgia than 
I have met with in any other portion of the South, 
and they are not few in number. The more intel- 
ligent young men of from twenty to thirty years, 
who are now beginning to assert themselves, are, 
as a rule, the foremost missionaries in the new 



GEORGIA—EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH. 6i 

civilization in the South. They are fretful under 
the booted and spurred Brigadiers, who insist that 
the sons shall bear aloft the shields of their 
fathers, and make themselves mournfully sentimen- 
tal over the Lost Cause. They are as reverent of 
their fathers as circumstances will permit, but they 
believe that the abolition of slavery was a blessing 
to the South as well as to the nation, and they 
don't believe in wailing about the loss of what 
they wouldn't have back if they could get it. They 
honor the graves and memories of those who fought 
and fell in the cause of the South ; they build beau- 
tiful monuments to prove that they are not strangers 
to their parentage, but they feel that if their fathers 
had been half as heroic in developing the South 
and stamping it with peaceful progress as they were 
in fighting for what they never should have had, the 
Southern States would be a garden of beauty and 
plenty to-day. They are especially anti-Bourbon in 
politics, and a large majority of the more cultured 
and energetic young men of Georgia would to-day 
be Republicans from choice if Republicanism as 
now directed was not mainly a mixture of section- 
alism and plunder. They don't want offices, for they 

have learned a better way of making a living, and 

6* 



52 THE SOUTH. 

they are manly in their independence. Instead of 
discussing the old plantation times " before the wah," 
they talk about railroads, factories, the tariff, the 
schools, the increase of crops, and the growth of 
wealth and trade, and these are civilizers which will 
soon disarm Southern Bourbons and Northern dema- 
gogues. The rapid growth of this new civilization 
is evidenced by the increase in number of small 
farmers and their general prosperity, and in the 
rapidly multiplied factories in both the cotton and 
iron sections of the State. With forty cotton-fac- 
tories and the ceaseless hum of nearly two hundred 
thousand spindles, and with nearly one hundred 
furnaces and iron-mills to diversify industry and 
open new markets for the farmers, there must be 
progress. The factory and the school are the 
great civilizers of the age in the South, and they 
are now doing a grand work in Georgia. Here 
the cotton is grown; here labor is cheaper than in 
the North ; here it can be fed and clothed better 
than on the bleak hills of New England or in the 
crowded cities, and here the cotton-spindle should 
answer the song of the cotton-gin. And wherever 
the factory is reared, there, is a new civilization 
planted in the desolation of slavery. The shade, 



GEORGIA— EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH. 53 

the vine, the flower, the tidy fence, and the tasteful 
home about the cotton-mill, tell the story of the 
future South, and the uniform prosperity of the 
mills of this State must speedily multiply their 
numbers. They have invaded South Carolina across 
the Savannah from Augusta, and Augusta has built 
a vast canal to furnish water-power to invite capi- 
tal, while South Carolina exempted from taxation 
for ten years all factories erected in the State.* 
Columbus, in this State, is one of the most pros- 
perous towns in the whole country, solely because 
of the many factories which nestle in and around 
it, and some of the mills divide from fifteen to 
thirty per cent, to their shareholders, while all of 
them are earning profits. The Cotton States now 
bring three hundred millions of dollars annually 
to their people by their cotton crop, but they pay 
the Northern and foreign mills nearly as many mil- 
lions to spin it, when they could earn the nearly three 
hundred millions more easily here than it can be 
earned elsewhere. In short, their crop that is worth 
three hundred millions when it comes from the 



* The exemption law was repealed this year, but it still applies to 
all erected under the law. 



64 



THE SOUTH. 



cotton-gin, would be worth six hundred millions if 
they turned it out from the spindle and loom, and 
they are just beginning to understand that simple 
question of arithmetic. The young men, the factory, 
the school, the hardiness and comfort of industry, — 
these are the new civilizers which are to revolution- 
ize the old Slave States. 

I am sorry to point to one blot on the escutcheon 
of Georgia that should be effaced. It is much the 
creation of the lingering passions of war and of the 
irritation and distrust of the rule that followed re- 
construction. There were many unwise enactments 
under the Bullock administration, which had all the 
flavor of reckless profligacy. Aid was lavishly voted 
to speculative railways, and adventurous strangers 
expected to profit by them much more than they 
expected to profit the State ; and there was natural 
revolt against the whole policy of the new govern- 
ment. Governor Bullock finally gave up the un- 
equal contest by resigning; the projected railroads 
were mostly built in some way, and no venality has 
ever been traced to Bullock ; but a sweeping tide of 
repudiation followed, and some six millions of appar- 
ently lawfully contracted debt has been refused pay- 
ment. The accepted debt of the State is about nine 



GEORGIA— EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH. 



65 



millions, but there is railroad property representing 
it that would nearly or quite pay it at present market 
value. There is, therefore, no plea of necessity to 
excuse Georgia in repudiating any part of her debt; 
but it has been consigned to repudiation, first by 
statute and next by constitutional amendment in 
1877, forbidding legislative appropriation for interest 
or principal, and denying the courts jurisdiction to 
inquire into its validity. This refusal to submit the 
question of the legality of the debt to the judicial 
tribunals of the State, all of which are in harmony 
with the political power that repudiated the bonds, is 
a confession that a dispassionate inquiry into the mat- 
ter would be likely to sustain the claim of the cred- 
itors for at least part of the debt. By closing the 
courts against the bondholders, Georgia has griev- 
ously wronged herself, and her people must revoke 
the constitutional mandate of repudiation or stand 
dishonored before the world. . As thistles can't bear 
figs, so repudiation can't bear anything but demoral- 
ization and wrong-doing. The repudiated bonds are 
valueless on the market, and the false attitude in 
which Georgia has placed herself tempts the specu- 
lator to trade in her dishonor. Counsel for the 
bondholders, representing those who hold at little 



(i^ THE SOUTH. 

cost, are besieging Congress to open the United 
States Courts, by constitutional amendment, and in- 
vite suits against the States by individuals. Such 
amendment is fraught with such boundless evils that 
it can't prevail ; but it is one of the many pretexts for 
sectional turbulence, and for unscrupulous politicians 
and speculators to seek Congressional aid to force 
the South into submission. It is not done against 
Republican Minnesota, but it is done against recon- 
structed Georgia. If it were a wise thing to do, it 
should be done without regard to North or South, 
but neither section will accept such an amendment 
of the Constitution when they must look it squarely 
in the face. The new Georgia that the new civilizers 
are rapidly fashioning should open her courts to her 
creditors, as they are now open to all citizens to test 
the validity of debts, and I believe that before another 
decade shall have passed every debt that has been 
unjustly repudiated will be honestly assumed and 
paid. 

The race question is not a serious problem in 
Georgia, as is shown by the harmony that exists be- 
tween the whites and the blacks, and by the wonder- 
ful growth of wealth among the blacks. When Gov- 
ernor Bullock retired from the office, the assessed 



GEORGIA— EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH. 



67 



property of the blacks in the State was not one hun- 
dred thousand dollars, and now, under the same 
assessment laws, it is many millions. The negroes 
have become large purchasers of small cotton farms, 
and they have prospered beyond all reasonable ex- 
pectation. This class of blacks are not politicians by 
trade, and most of them vote with the many reputable 
white Republicans in the State for the Democratic 
State and local tickets, although they maintain their 
Republican faith and organization. They do not 
want the class of State and legislative officers that 
Republican local rule would inevitably bring upon 
them. They have just laws, equal protection for both 
races, economical government, universal education, 
and they want no change. In Atlanta one-sixth of 
the whole voters are white Republicans, but most of 
them vote steadily for Democratic State and local 
rulers. The schools of the State are open to both 
races on equal terms, and the State aid to the colored 
college has been placed on exact equality with the 
State University for whites by constitutional pro- 
visions. High schools, equally for both races, may 
be maintained by special county taxation, if ordered 
by a vote of the people, and two high grade schools 
specially for the colored race are in progress in At- 



68 THE SOUTH. 

lanta, exclusive of the colored college. This general 
system of education, equally for both races, has not 
been grudgingly adopted by the white government of 
Georgia. On the contrary, it is heartily sustained by 
the great mass of the whites, and, as a rule, they gen- 
erously aid rather than hinder the advancement of the 
blacks. The healthy divisions between the whites 
on State and local tickets have made all sides seek 
friendly relations with the blacks, and not one of the 
many more intelligent colored citizens I have met 
has complained of any want of justice to their race. 
But for the stain of repudiation that rests upon 
Georgia, I would say that her people have been as 
conspicuously faithful as they have been prosper- 
ous in revising her citizenship and rehabilitating 
the Commonwealth. 

Atlanta ranks with Richmond and Vicksburg 
in historic associations connected with the war. It 
did not differ greatly from other Southern cities 
before Sherman destroyed it, but it had become a 
great railway centre, and as such was a most im- 
portant military base for either army. It was more 
heroically defended by the Confederacy than any 
other point, with the single exception of Richmond, 
and no one city of the South witnessed such desper- 



GEORGIA— EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH. 



69 



ate conflicts immediately around it for its possession. 
With all the exceptional growth of Atlanta and the 
wonderful repairs of the ravages of war, there are 
vastly greater evidences of the sanguinary struggle 
here than at the Confederate capital, for the capture 
of which there was such fearful sacrifice of life. 
The battle for Atlanta was immediately around 
Atlanta, and the earth-works on which Hood made 
his last desperate and bloody stand for this gateway 
to the vitals of the South, are yet to be seen in 
broken fragments about the beautiful residences 
which embellish the suburbs of the city. Here the 
last hopeful struggle of the South was made, for 
after Atlanta fell there never was anything like an 
equal battle fought between the two armies. Thomas 
crushed the remnant of Hood's veterans at Nashville, 
and Grant simply hastened the overthrow of Lee 
rather by wearing out than by open conflict. A 
beautiful monument but a little distance from the 
city commemorates the heroism and lamented death 
of the gallant McPherson, and every acre of ground 
in and for miles around the city has felt the shock 
of the most valiant armies of the world and has 
been the death-couch of the blue or the gray. 
When Sherman entered it with his shattered but 

7 



70 



THE SOUTH. 



victorious army he was in the heart of the enemy's 
country, and the destruction of the city was deemed 
a mihtary necessity. Hood had destroyed all the 
buildings containing any stores before he retreated, 
and Sherman accepted the harsh necessity of de- 
stroying the place to leave the enemy without a 
base to reorganize and pursue him in his perilous 
march to the sea. He notified the citizens to elect 
which government they would choose for their 
protection, sent those who gave the oath of alle- 
giance to the North, gave all others safe-conduct 
beyond his lines, with such property as they could 
take with them, and then made Atlanta one scene 
of desolation. Here and there an ante-bellum 
Southern home stands in contrast with the modern 
buildings which surround them, but they were as 
brands snatched from the burning. Atlanta was 
destroyed, but it remained the gateway of the trade 
that survived the waste of war ; it is on the through 
line from the North to the Gulf; the best vigor of 
the South with the best vigor of the North seem 
to have met here on the same mission, and the 
new Atlanta is the Queen of Beauty among South- 
ern cities and is rich in all that constitutes enduring 
wealth. 



GEORGIA— EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH, yi 

The influence of Atlanta upon Georgia and upon 
the whole South is incalculable. Already it has 
revolutionized Georgia. It has not been done by 
Atlanta verdicts at the polls so much as by the 
advanced leadership that pours out its live cur- 
rents of healthy progress in every direction. There 
are Confederate fossils here as elsewhere in the 
South, but their wails fall upon heedless ears ; they 
are placemen who flaunt the Republican flag bear- 
ing the skull and cross-bones of sectionalism, but 
there are many reputable business men of the Re- 
publican faith who will one day reach a better 
domination for the party, and there are many thrift- 
less negroes who steal and sell their votes to both 
sides and cheat all around in every election contest, 
but there are solid colored men in trade, and the 
colored college keeps abreast with the white uni- 
versity in the higher education of the black man. 
Here the most advanced leaders of the whole 
South have their homes, and they are felt in every 
precinct of Georgia, and the tide of progress cannot 
be swelling up in the centre of the South without 
overflowing and finding its outlet into all the sur- 
rounding States. 

The bold deliverance made by Senator Brown 



72 



THE SOUTH. 



before his election to the Senate, undoubtedly 
voiced the purposes of the new Atlanta and of 
the new South. He had no Confederate scars to 
commend him to the Bourbons. On the contrary, 
he had vexed Jefferson Davis with threatened seces- 
sion from secession when the war struck Georgia, 
over which he then ruled as Governor, and he was 
the chosen Chief Justice of the Bullock Repub- 
lican reign and a Grant delegate to the Chicago 
Convention in 1868. He is consistent and logical, 
therefore, in his pointed declaration that Georgia 
must move as the world moves, and he was chosen 
to the Senate over General Lawson, one of the 
most distinguished of Confederate soldiers, with all 
his past record to offend the Bourbon South and 
solely because he has shaken off the musty shroud 
of the Confederacy, left the dead to sleep with the 
dead, and proposed to advance to the living pres- 
ent with heroic intent to deliver the reconstructed 
States from the gloom and poverty of the past. 
With Georgia, the mightiest and most prosperous 
of all the Southern States, thus asserting herself 
in favor of what is to be the new civilization of the 
South, I look for her to be more potential in the 
restoration of the South to enduring prosperity 



GEORGIA— EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH. 



73 



than any other factor in solving the great problem 
known as the Southern question. 

Atlanta is fairly typical of Georgia in the solidity 
of her prosperity. It is not the apparent prosperity 
that is visible " where wealth accumulates and men 
decay." It is the general diffusion of wealth and the 
diffused creation of individual wealth for its own 
producer that makes Georgia exceptionally prosper- 
ous to-day, and the same causes are producing like 
results largely in South Carolina and in North Caro- 
lina. Necessity broke up the immense plantations 
of Georgia, and what her planters deemed a dire 
calamity several years after the war has proved the 
greatest blessing to her people. The attempts made 
for several years after peace to renew cotton-growing 
on the old plantation system bankrupted a large 
majority of the planters. They did not understand 
free labor, free labor would not understand the old 
plantation ways, and when the planters gave up in 
despair, the small farmers, white and black, rented 
little slices of the plantations, prospered as their 
own employers, gradually purchased small homes, 
and now both laborer and planter are growing rich 
together. It is not the wealth and luxury of the 
old-time plantations, but it is the better and more 

7* 



74 THE SOUTH. 

enduring wealth and comfort that comes from well- 
directed industry and the harmony of all classes. I 
believe that in another decade Georgia will have 
doubled her cotton production; that her own bread 
will all be grown on her own soil, and that the in- 
come from her cotton will be doubled from every 
bale by spinning and weaving her entire product. 
An adjustable attachment to the cotton-gin is already 
in use that takes in the raw seed-cotton and turns it 
out in yarn, thus doubling the market value of every 
pound ; and with the impetus given to the spindle 
and the loom in Georgia, it is not an extravagant 
assumption to say that the growth of cotton will be 
nearly doubled in another ten years in Georgia, and 
that Georgia spindles will double the value of the 
doubled product. Every good cotton crop, under the 
direction of small farmers, is certain to increase the 
succeeding crop by the improvement of the land and 
the enlargement of the planting, and the opportunity 
for both is immense in all the cotton States. So far 
from being surprised at the wonderful increase of 
wealth in the South during the last ten years, the 
only surprise to the intelligent student of Southern 
opportunities and possibilities is that a people 
prompted by necessity, as the South has been, did 



GEORGIA— EMPIRE STATE OF THE SOUTH. 



75 



not much more increase their wealth. Unless some 
new hindrance to Southern progress shall be invented 
by those who have everything at stake in sectional 
turbulence, the census of 1890 will show a growth in 
every element of prosperity in the South that even 
the progressive North cannot equal. 

The city of Augusta, just across the Savannah 
from South Carolina, is one of the most attractive 
cities of the South, and it has many things besides 
its broad, shaded streets and towering cotton-mills 
to attract the visitor. The tallest smoke-stack ever 
erected in the country stands at the edge of the city, 
as a monument of solitude to tell of the vast Confed- 
erate powder-works which were once a hive of in- 
dustry there. The powder-works have all disap- 
peared, but the tall smoke-stack stands and towers 
high over the city, with an inscription telling its own 
story. It has been dedicated as a monument, and is 
maintained in good condition by one of the Southern 
war associations. Close by an old, vine-clad church, 
whose city of the dead is washed by the waters of the 
Savannah, is the grave of the Bishop-General, Leoni- 
das Polk, and by his side sleeps his wife ; and in the 
centre of the broad street that divides the city is the 
most beautiful Confederate monument of the South, 



76 



THE SOUTH. 



excepting only the New Orleans monument of Lee. 
But now peace has come with all its beneficent fruits, 
and the hum of thousands of spindles and the clank 
of hundreds of looms declare how Georgia is aiding 
in the creation of the New South. 



MONTGOMERY— ALABAMA. 



Montgomery is one of the old-time beautiful cities 
of the South. Its winter is perpetual spring, and the 
live-oak shades which beautify the homes on the 
gentle hills surrounding it are scarcely rusted in their 
summer verdure. On an eminence fronting a busi- 
ness street double the width of Broad in Philadelphia, 
stands the Capitol, and from its white portals there is 
a grand view of the city and the surrounding country 
for miles. The highlands are green with the shades 
of the massively-pillared residences which denote the 
luxury and culture of old plantation days, and below 
is the silver line of the Alabama as it lazily drifts to 
the sea. There are evident signs of the dark days 
which befell the South and of the countless sacrifices 
which came with them. With twenty years of peace 
and half as many years of slow revival of wealth, 
there are unmistakable evidences of the yet unarrested 
decay that began when poverty followed war. I can 

77 



78 THE SOUTH. 

readily imagine what Montgomery was twenty-five 
years ago, when it witnessed the most imposing civil 
pageant in the history of the Confederacy, in the 
inauguration of its Provisional President. The Capi- 
tal of Alabama had been chosen as the Capital of 
the new Confederacy, and the greenest of Southern 
laurels and the happiest smiles of Southern beauty 
welcomed the first civil ruler of the Slave Republic, 
as he was borne through the streets by eight ele- 
gantly caparisoned horses, to receive the oath of office 
on the portico of the first temple of Confederate laws. 
There were then no shadows to mingle with the enthu- 
siasm of the blindly rushing multitude. There were 
no vacant chairs about home circles, no bereavement 
sobbing in Northern and Southern hearts. The Con- 
federacy was here regarded as an accomplished fact, 
and war was pronounced the hallucination of the 
alarmist and dreamer. Beauty and bounty were on 
every side in the new Capital, and the faded Execu- 
tive Mansion that still nestles in its wealth of heart- 
some shade and flowers in the centre of the city, was 
then typical of the beauty of its surrounding Southern 
homes. Now the grinding wear of desolation and 
want which came with disaster to the cause that here 
was launched upon the boisterous sea of nations, is 



MONTGOMER Y— ALABAMA. 



79 



yet visible even in the largely restored prosperity 
that has been attained in nearly half a generation of 
peace, and Montgomery is wonderfully beautiful with 
all her scars. 

Alabama is rich in natural resources, rich in prod- 
ucts, and richer in Bourbonism than is best for her 
people. There is peace among all races and classes, 
but it was long the peace of decay rather than the 
peace of progress. The whites have a majority of 
voters in the State, but the color line has passed 
away, and the control of the colored vote is more 
complete in Alabama with less violence or friction 
than in any of the other cotton States. The large 
masses of negroes are huddled together in the narrow 
cotton belt that crosses from west to east. There 
they outnumber the whites three and sometimes five 
to one, while in the other portions of the State they 
are in hopeless minorities. In the Capital county they 
are two to one, but they have their Democratic organ 
owned and edited by a colored man ; they have their 
Democratic clubs in which many of the most thrifty 
and intelligent negroes are active members, and they 
fairly give the whites a majority against their own 
race simply because the stench of carpet-bag and 
colored rule is yet in their nostrils, and because 



8o THE SOUTH. 

every business interest is identified with white con- 
trol. As I write I can see from the window the 
broad street crowded with the rude vehicles of the 
colored tenants who are hurrying their cotton crop 
to market to " get straight" with their rent. Many 
of the fields are yet white with their fleecy harvest, 
but swarms of the tenantry are to be seen in the 
street daily with their rickety wagons, lank mules, 
and rope harness, but every bale of cotton is fifty 
dollars of wealth, and the colored tenants are rapidly 
acquiring riches. A large renter informed me that 
what are known as " rent notes" of colored tenants 
are among the best collaterals in the loan of money, 
and better than the same obligations of white rent- 
ers as a rule, because the negro who summons up 
the energy to farm for himself is reasonably certain 
to succeed, and his first effort is to pay his rent. 
Blacks and whites are indiscriminately intermingled 
on the street, at the cotton stores, and in all the 
channels of business, and the shops and other me- 
chanical pursuits exhibit the white and the black man 
side by side in earning their bread. Thus on the 
surface there is colored thrift and harmony between 
the races, but Alabama is behind Georgia and even 
South Carolina in solving the great problem of the 



MONTG OMER Y— ALABAMA. 3 j 

South. Her people were left richer at the close of 
the war than the people of any of the Southern States. 
They had large stores of cotton to throw into market 
at an enormous price, and the destructive tread of 
contending armies was unfelt outside of Mobile and 
the narrow line of Wilson's raid. They had not 
necessity as the stern teacher of progress as Georgia, 
the Carolinas, and Virginia had, and their old plan- 
tation system is preserved in the cotton belt, and a 
negro tenantry is making wealth for the planters. 
The schools are open in every township equally to 
both races ; graded schools are maintained for both 
in the larger towns and cities, and two normal schools 
for the blacks are sustained by the State ; but negro 
suffrage is here more than in any other region I have 
seen the dependence of the whites. Much of it is 
due to the fearful fraud practised upon them and the 
State by the infamous carpet-bag rule of six years, as 
it impoverished whites and blacks alike and left the 
deluded negro politicians demoralized and starving ; 
but there is a measure of absolute dependence upon 
the whites by the blacks that is not common in the 
South. They have learned that the whites will rule ; 
they know that they and their property are safer with 
home judges and planter jurors, and they are easily 



82 THE SOUTH. 

controlled in politics when a color line would at best 
be hopeless. I believe that the intelligent colored 
driver who took me through the beautiful city 
summed up the race issue in a single sentence. 
When asked whether they were intimidated in vot- 
ing, he answered, " De gen'men don't do it; but 
dere's right smart of it among de low-down folks." 
Between the planters and their old slaves there is 
the kindest feeling and generally sympathetic rela- 
tions, but in desperate political emergencies " de 
low-down folks" are important factors in effecting 
results. ^^ 

Alabama has had her full proportion of the carpet- 
bag scourge in profligate waste and dishonest mul- 
tiplication of debt under color of law, and this is 
the only State whose Democratic administration, 
that was chosen to correct the ways of the plun- 
dering adventurer, made the carpet-bag government 
comparatively respectable by imitating its misrule. 
The lavish expenditure of public money under the 
early reconstruction government and the wild abuse 
of the credit of the Commonwealth utterly bank- 
rupted the treasury, closed the public schools for 
more than a year, flooded the country with tempo- 
rary loan bills receivable for taxes, and so completely 



MONTGOMER Y— ALABAMA. 



83 



destroyed all faith in the obligations of the State that 
the old and never disputed eight per cent, bonds of 
Alabama sold as low as twenty cents on the dollar. 
And when the people elected Governor Lindsay as a 
representative of the property interest, he became the 
victim or confederate of the old plundering regime, 
and left the office without retrieving the credit of the 
State. Abler and truer men succeeded him, and after 
much tribulation in both finding the whereabouts and 
extent of the debt, and in negotiating with the cred- 
itors, the obligations of Alabama have been funded in 
one class of bonds, bearing two, three, four, and five 
per cent, as they approach maturity. The carpet- 
bag rulers did not even keep a complete record of 
the debt they created or of the bonds they issued, 
and search had to be made in London, New York, 
and among the various railroads which were pre- 
sumably aided by legislation, to ascertain how many 
millions of obligations were out bearing the promise 
of the State to pay them. A commission was created 
to hunt up and adjust the debt on some equitable 
basis for the approval of the Legislature, and after 
its final adjustment by sifting and compromise of the 
jobber's portion of it, there is now an accepted debt 
of nine millions, on which interest is promptly paid 



84 



THE SOUTH. 



and gradual provision made for the payment of the 
principal. The debt "question is, therefore, removed 
from the reach of agitation such as has convulsed 
and demoralized Tennessee, Virginia, and North Car- 
olina, and there is assured stability in the integrity of 
Alabama. 



MOBILE HARBOR AND RIVERS. 



Mobile is one of the few important natural gate- 
ways to the world of waters in the South, and second 
only to the Mississippi outlet in the industry it 
should inspire and the commerce it should command. 
The beautiful bay on which Mobile is situated has 
natural tributaries reaching far into almost boundless 
sources of natural wealth, which must at no distant 
day build up one of the grandest empires of the 
New South ; and yet the Mobile of the present gives 
no token of its better destiny, and has only faded 
monuments of its past commerce and wealth. It 
teaches more pointedly than any other centre of 
trade in the South, the peril of a State that relies 
upon a single staple product and the peril of a city 
whose business is limited to a single productive in- 
dustry. Before the war, Mobile handled eight hun- 
dred thousand bales of cotton annually, and that 
alone gave it a commerce that made it one of the 

8* 85 



36 THE SOUTH. 

most prosperous centres of the coast, with uncommon 
wealth, culture, and prosperity. The necessities of 
war quickened the energies of the South ; new high- 
ways were opened for armies and for trade, and they 
diverted trade to new centres, leaving Mobile with 
two-thirds of her cotton shipments lost in the race. 
Cotton was the one staple product of Alabama, and 
the one source of the commerce of Mobile, and 
when cotton was attracted to other commercial cen- 
tres, there was nothing left for Mobile but paralysis 
and decay. The same people remain the same; 
culture is maintained in its proverbially hospitable 
people ; the same earnest, hopeful effort prevails in 
her intelligent business circles ; but neither popu- 
lation, culture, nor business effort can succeed in the 
unequal contest that has confronted that city of such 
exceptional natural advantages, and the unerring 
index of departed business and thrift are noted in 
the tenantless temples of commerce and in the 
blighted chaplets of commercial achievement. The 
natural conclusion that would be accepted by the 
North is, that Mobile must be the author of its own 
decline; but it is not the truth. The war left this 
city impoverished as it left the South generally, and 
the vast outlay necessary to make the marvellous 



MOBILE HARBOR AND RIVERS. 



87 



natural advantages of the port available has not been 
within the power of either Mobile or Alabama. 

To understand the causes which have left Mobile 
without advancement for twenty years after peace, 
and appreciate the future possibilities of this city, it 
is necessary to take a comprehensive view of the 
State of Alabama. I have studied the resources and 
opportunities of the State with special interest, be- 
cause they are certain to revolutionize some of our 
chief sources of wealth in Pennsylvania ; and the 
more they are studied, the more clear it must become 
to every intelligent mind that England is not to-day 
more the rival of the Keystone State in the future 
production of iron and coal than is Alabama. There 
is not a source of mineral wealth in Pennsylvania, 
excepting only our oil product, that is not found in 
Alabama in equal or greater abundance, with the 
matchless advantages of climate, of easier and 
cheaper production, and of vastly cheaper transporta- 
tion. Nature's great gifts to Pennsylvania have been 
not only liberally supplemented in Alabama, but to 
them have been added every possible natural advan- 
tage for their cheap development and delivery to the 
markets of the world. If half the capital and busi- 
ness direction that have been given to make Pennsyl- 



88 THE SOUTH. 

vania peerless in the production of mineral wealth 
had been given to Alabama, her productive wealth 
would be as great as that of the iron State, and her 
population would be nearer five millions than the mil- 
lion and a quarter now scattered over the boundless 
but almost untouched riches of this sunny Common- 
wealth. Think of a State with over five thousand 
square miles of productive coal-fields, whose coal is 
now sold at a fair profit in New Orleans at less than 
four dollars per ton. It is mainly of the best quality, 
alike for commercial, manufacturing, and domestic 
purposes ; it is in large veins ; it is more easily mined 
than our most favorably located bituminous coal- 
fields in the North ; and in large portions of the coal- 
fields there is good iron in abundance, much of it 
requiring no actual mining at all, and with the iron 
and coal is found the limestone. What has been 
done in Birmingham not only can be done as well in 
many other parts of the State, but it can be even 
more profitably done in Birmingham and elsewhere in 
Alabama as soon as the great natural highways of 
the State shall be made available; and no citizen of 
the North of fair intelligence can review the slumber- 
ing wealth of Alabama and the water-ways which 
offer the cheapest transportation, without accepting 



MOBILE HARBOR AND RIVERS. 



89 



the conclusion that the next generation will see this 
State an iron and coal centre equal to if not sur- 
passing Pennsylvania, and Mobile the great coal 
depot of the coast. It is this rational hope to which 
this balmy city of the South clings in portraying the 
rtvival of her commerce, the renewal and enlarge- 
ment of her business temples, and the more than 
restoration of her lost wealth and grandeur. 

Not a vessel graces the broad rivers of Pennsyl- 
vania beyond the coast in the east. The Susque- 
hanna, the Schuylkill, the Delaware, and the Juniata 
are simply beautiful but useless outlets for our moun- 
tain springs as they go murmuring to the sea; but 
Mobile is the outlet of many rivers which penetrate 
into the leading centres of wealth in Alabama, and 
the finest bay of the continent connects them with the 
great highways of the world. With no more expen- 
diture than has been wasted on mud creeks and sum- 
mer mountain streams in a single River and Harbor 
appropriation bill, the Alabama River could be made 
navigable through the heart of the State away up to 
Rome, in the northern part of Georgia, and the now 
easy navigation of the Tombigbee could be extended 
up the Warrior to the great centre of iron and coal, 
west of Birmingham. No State not reached by the 



90 



THE SOUTH. 



Father of Waters and its tributaries approaches Ala- 
bama in the magnificence of her natural highways, 
and even the Mississippi, although commanding 
tribute from two-thirds of the States of the Union, 
offers no such facilities for the interior development 
of any one State as do the water-ways of Alabama. 
An expenditure of from half to three-quarters of a 
million would make uninterrupted water navigation 
from the Warrior coal and iron region to the sea, and 
two millions more would make the Alabama bring 
the fruits of her fields and mines from the far north 
and northeastern part of the State, and draw upon 
Northwestern Georgia to swell the commerce of Mo- 
bile. The channel of Mobile Bay has been already 
greatly improved, and every foot of depth attained 
has held its own. The pressure of the new energies 
of the New South must hasten the needed improve- 
ment of these great natural gifts to the commerce of 
the South, and when the river arteries of trade and 
the channel of the bay shall have been completed, 
the development of wealth in Alabama must be ex- 
ceptional if not unexampled in the history of our sub- 
stantial progress. As early as the administration of 
the second Adams the importance of these water- 
ways was appreciated by the government, but Cotton 



MOBILE HARBOR AND RIVERS. qI 

was king; it met every apparent want of the South, 
and as there was no supreme necessity to press these 
improvements, they readily bowed to the more im- 
perious demands of trade in other sections of the 
Union. 

It is no idle dream that makes the people of the 
once prosperous but now languishing port of Mobile 
hopeful of a renewed and greatly increased commer- 
cial prosperity in the near future. I regard the ex- 
tension of her wonderful water-ways and the needed 
improvement of the channel of the bay as vastly 
more legitimate and important than the Hennepin 
Canal. The one is the traditional and accepted 
policy of the government ; the other is straining the 
most liberal ideas of legitimate public improvements 
by Congress; and both the rivers and the harbor 
have already been recognized in past appropriations 
as demanding the generous aid of the country. 
When completed, as I assume they must be at an 
early day, Pennsylvania must look to her laurels ; 
but there is no sound public policy that can make the 
interests of one State seek to hinder the development 
of a sister State that may outstrip the hitherto suc- 
cessful in the race for development and wealth. 
Whenever Alabama can make cheaper iron than 



92 



THE SOUTH. 



Pennsylvania to supply the country, Pennsylvania 
must transfer the rude music of her forges to the 
Sunny South ; and whenever Alabama can supply the 
world with cheaper coal than Pennsylvania, the world 
will buy of Alabama, and Pennsylvania capital and 
energy will not take pause over sentimental theories, 
but hasten to follow the larger profits of industry. 
With water transportation from the immense coal- 
fields of Alabama, and Mobile Bay completed for the 
largest shipping, no State in the Union and no nation 
of the world will be able to compete with this State 
in supplying the Gulf of Mexico, the West Indies, 
and Central and South America with coal. England 
now draws some four millions annually from those 
countries for coal, while the United States draws little 
more than a quarter of a million ; and the supremacy 
of Mobile as a cotton centre would be more than 
restored. Mobile would be literally the great gate- 
way to the waters of the world for the Southern coal 
trade if given the benefit of the gifts nature has be- 
stowed upon her ; and what interest or what section 
can assume to hinder so great a consummation? 
There are four thousand square miles of virgin pine 
forest, with large supplies of cypress and white-oak, 
which would be made marketable by these completed 



MOBILE HARBOR AND RIVERS. q^ 

water-ways, and the cotton belt of Alabama and East- 
ern Mississippi that sought Mobile before the war 
produces over a million bales annually. These are 
stubborn facts; facts which the people of Mobile are 
worshipping as the early salvation of both city and 
State ; facts which the people of Pennsylvania and of 
the North must look in the face soon at the latest, 
and the sooner the better. They foreshadow the 
same mutations in industry, trade, and wealth which 
have left their inexorable lessons on all ages and 
peoples of the past, and I welcome them as certain 
to give lustre to another of the many unpolished 
jewels of the Republic. 

One of the bright days of the Southern jour- 
ney dates a visit to the home of Mrs. Willson, 
among the many old-time beautiful residences which 
are in the suburban part of Mobile. Few in the 
North would know Augusta J. Evans as Mrs. Will- 
son, but the name of Miss Evans is familiar to 
all the lovers of literature in every section of the 
country. Her fine old mansion is thickly surrounded 
by live-oaks in perpetual verdure, a profusion of 
shrubbery and camellia-trees, radiant with thousands 
of bursting buds and blooming flowers. One tree 
that has evidently been the object of special care, 

9 



Q4 THE SOUTH. 

bore full three thousand bright scarlet buds and 
flowers on its exquisitely symmetrical branches, and 
when in full bloom it must illumine the whole 
neighborhood. The visitors were promptly admitted 
and greeted by the distinguished authoress in the 
hospitable style of the true Southern home. She 
was neatly clad in pretty gingham costume, and her 
welcome made all forgetful of formality. She lives 
and moves in a vast bower of flowers, all planted 
and nursed by her own hands, and she exhibits 
them with all the pride and affection of a Roman 
mother. Refreshments were served, and the one 
vacant place at the table had a napkin-ring hold- 
ing an exquisite white camellia. " That," said Mrs. 
Willson, " is my husband's bouquet for to-day, and 
he has never been without one at any breaking 
of bread in our home since we were married, now 
sixteen years ago." She discussed authors with 
freedom but in generous kindness, and spoke sor- 
rowfully of the decline in Southern literature caused 
by the long trials and sacrifices of war. She in- 
quired specially for Miss Brewster, of Philadelphia, 
and said that she had lately written to her urging the 
reprint of new editions of her books, " I read no 
history of the war," she said, with the impressive 



MOBILE HARBOR AND RIVERS. 



95 



pathos that only a woman could exhibit. ^* The 
story is too sad to me and to those who saw its 
terrible sweep of destruction, to be rescued from 
forgetfulness." She filled the hands of her visitors 
with flowers and their hearts with love. She is a 
model Southern housekeeper, takes entire charge 
of her plants and grounds and Jersey cows and 
horses, besides finding leisure to make rapid prog- 
ress in her new book. " I do it by having sys- 
tem," was her answer when asked how she managed 
to do so much. It was a pleasant hour, and it 
added another to the many specially memorable 
incidents of the journey in the South. 



BIRMINGHAM— THE SOUTHERN IRON 
CENTRE. 



If you want to see an infant Pennsylvania, with 
all the vigor and go-aheadativeness of the regu- 
lation American boy just ready to bounce out of 
long clothes into high-legged boots, come to Bir- 
mingham, in the heart of Alabama. It is Young 
America personified and improved. It has more 
push and better bottom than any suddenly created 
city on the continent, and it is a revelation to both 
North and South. Towns have sprung up as sud- 
denly in the oil regions and in new mining camps 
in the far Western mountains, but they have per- 
ished as speedily as they were created. Birming- 
ham has all the solidity of Pittsburg, or Reading, 
or Allentown, and it requires no labored investi- 
gation to learn that, matchless as has been the 
growth of this new-born city, it is yet in its in- 
fancy and certain to attain the earliest and most 
96 



BIRMINGHAM— SOUTHERN IRON CENTRE. g>j 

vigorous manhood. Twelve years ago the solitude 
of Birmingham was attested by a single ordinary 
farm-house ; but two railways finally crossed each 
other there, and this invited capitalists to investi- 
gate the great coal, iron, and limestone beds of 
Central Alabama. Stories had been long told of 
them that were regarded as akin to fable, and when 
peace came, and railways began to traverse the New 
South, capitalists came to the little house on the 
cross railways, planted their investments about it, 
and now a city of nearly twenty thousand popu- 
lation, with boundless energy and more than com- 
mon thrift, has begun the inevitable revolution in 
the iron trade of the continent. Some idea of the 
substantial growth of the city may be learned from 
the valuation of property for taxable purposes in 
the county of Jefferson, that was two millions in 
1882 and nine millions in 1884. It has none of 
the signs of heedless haste for temporary use ex- 
hibited in the new oil and mining towns. It has 
one of the finest opera-houses in the South; its 
residences rival the beauty of Atlanta homes; its 
stores and business houses present all the best quali- 
ties of Northern energy and method, and its large 
class of skilled operatives enjoy a measure of com- 

9^ 



gg THE SOUTH. 

fort that is exceptional in Southern industry. It is 
largely a Northern creation, but it is worthy of note 
how thoroughly the Birmingham Southerner keeps 
abreast with the Northerner in every channel of 
progress. 

Twelve years ago the total coal product of Ala- 
bama was ten thousand tons a year; now nearly 
half that amount is sent to market each day, the 
total tonnage of 1885 being over one million five 
hundred thousand. Twelve years ago the total pig- 
iron product of the State was sixty thousand tons ; 
now it is six hundred thousand. These two sen- 
tences speak volumes to the iron and coal interests 
of the whole country. Remember that while the in- 
crease noted in the iron and coal product covers a 
period of twelve years, to date the sluggish product 
of ante-bellum times, the chief growth has been in 
one-third of that period, and during a season of 
continued and steadily increasing depression in the 
iron and coal trade of the country. This marvel- 
lous srrowth has come in Alabama when the Phila- 
delphia and Reading Railroad Company has been 
bankrupted by the prostration of the iron and coal 
industries of Pennsylvania ; there has been uninter- 
rupted prosperity here, while a large proportion of 



BIRMINGHAM— SOUTHERN IRON CENTRE. qq 

our Pennsylvania furnaces have been driven to idle- 
ness, and those that continued have, as a rule, 
been fortunate if they escaped actual loss. In like 
manner, the coal trade of this region has been 
reasonably prosperous, while many of our Pennsyl- 
vania operators have been bankrupted, and others 
have escaped bankruptcy by closing their mines. 
The condition of the coal trade in the North has 
been clearly portrayed by the almost constant strikes 
and disputes between employers and employed, each 
struggling for the little profit the business offered, 
while here there has been no interruption in the 
production of coal. Convict labor largely fills the 
channels of unskilled industry in the mines, but 
free labor is much better, and it more than holds its 
own even against the unequal competition. There 
must be great natural causes for this contrast between 
the iron and coal industries of this city and like in- 
dustries in Pennsylvania, where a full quarter of a 
century has been, devoted to the perfection of trans- 
portation lines and the cheapest methods of pro- 
duction. We certainly have solved that problem 
in our State. Capital has not been wanting; on 
the contrary, it has been lavishly supplied to make 
our coal and iron beds most profitable; but with 



100 THE SOUTH. 

all the boundless resources of the North, this iron 
and coal centre prospers while the same industries 
in the North languish, and when the South is only 
in the infancy of transportation facilities. And let 
not the North be deluded with the idea that this 
strange development in the heart of the South is 
ephemeral. There has been no sudden local demand 
and no specially fortuitous circumstance to create 
a city here as if by magic. It has been done simply 
because it can, with imperfect facilities for reaching 
the markets of the country, more than rival our 
chief iron and coal centres of the North ; and with 
that fact accepted, what must be the future of a 
State that has the resources to multiply its Bir- 
minghams almost indefinitely? 

Unless all evidence and calculation are at fault, the 
iron and coal of this region within range of cheap 
production are practically inexhaustible. Birming- 
ham is part of the great Black Warrior coal-field, that 
contains over five thousand square ipiles of accessible 
coal, and to it may be added the two hundred square 
miles of equally good and accessible coal in the Ca- 
haba field and one hundred and fifty square miles 
more in the Coosa field. In addition to these, it may 
be well to consider the five thousand three hundred 



BIRMINGHAM— SOUTHERN IRON CENTRE, jqi 

square miles of coal just south of the Tennessee. 
These nearly eleven thousand square miles of coal 
are practically one vast coal-field, capable of supply- 
ing the world with that commodity. As yet it is 
not penetrated by water navigation, but when half 
a million dollars or little more would open the great 
Warrior coal-field to uninterrupted water highway to 
every port of the world through Mobile Bay, how 
long will it require the lesson of Birmingham to open 
the grand water highways of Alabama to the illimit- 
able wealth of her coal-fields ? The maximum cost 
of coal here is one dollar and twenty-five cents per 
ton at the furnace doors. It is found in nearly hori- 
zontal strata, and varies from six to one hundred and 
fifty feet in thickness, the Warrior field, whence this 
city is supplied, having the thickest veins. The iron 
ore, that is mined and delivered cheaper than at any 
of our great iron-fields of the North, is absolutely 
exhaustless, and embraces the red hematite and the 
brown ores, with a more than ample supply of lime- 
stone close at hand. Red Mountain takes its name 
from its iron, and it is almost literally a mountain of 
iron. It is estimated by official geological reports 
that there are five hundred billion tons of iron in it 
alone. These exceptional facilities for producing iron 



I02 



THE SOUTH. 



and coal are increased by the more genial climate and 
cheaper labor that must ever be obtained where both 
fuel and food are cheapened by the absence of severe 
Northern winters. This is the only iron centre as 
yet developed that seems to offer the production of 
iron at the minimum of cost, as it has every requisite 
for iron in superabundance, and all attainable at the 
furnace with the least outlay. The one drawback 
that has hindered the appearance of Birmingham iron 
in all our Northern markets is transportation ; but 
even with the disadvantages of costly freights, iron 
from this city now successfully competes with Penn- 
sylvania at home and in New York and New Eng- 
land. The Southern railways cannot afford the cheap 
freights that the Northern lines can offer because of 
their immensely larger traffic ; but the South will 
rapidly improve in its transportation lines ; its im- 
proved transportation will rapidly develop industrial 
products, and both will rapidly cheapen transporta- 
tion until it approximates Northern rates. And when 
comparatively cheap railway transportation shall come 
to the iron and coal of Alabama, with water transit 
by the Warrior and the Tombigbee Rivers to the sea, 
who can measure the growth of those industries in 
this State ? 



BIRMINGHAM— SOUTHERN IRON CENTRE. 103 

It is idle for Pennsylvania and other great iron- and 
coal-producing States to close their eyes to the fact 
that we have reached the beginning of a great revolu- 
tion in those products. No legislation, no sound 
public policy, no sentiment can halt such a revolution 
when the immutable laws of trade command it; and 
the sudden tread of the hordes from the Northern 
forests upon ancient Rome did not more surely 
threaten the majesty of the mistress of the world, 
than does the tread of the iron- and coal-diggers of 
Alabama threaten the majesty of Northern iron- and 
coal-fields. I do not credit the common saying that 
iron can be produced here for nine dollars per 
ton. There are many here who will tell you so ; 
but after careful inquiry in the most intelligent 
and reliable circles, I fix an entirely safe limit of 
average cost at eleven dollars and fifty cents. There 
is iron produced here at less than that cost; but 
eleven dollars and fifty cents is as just an estimate 
for Birmingham as seventeen dollars is for Penn- 
sylvania; and it must be remembered that Penn- 
sylvania has reached the minimum cost in the pro- 
duction and marketing of her iron, while Alabama 
can and will greatly cheapen the delivery of her iron 
in the great centres of the trade. And what is true 



I04 



THE SOUTH. 



of iron must be equally true of coal. They are twin- 
sisters, whose development must keep pace with each 
other. Nova Scotia will soon learn to fear Alabama 
more than the small tariff now imposed upon her 
imported coal, and instead of extorting double prices 
for bituminous coal, as she did in the early days of 
the late war, before protection had developed our 
Northern mines, she will find Alabama crowding 
both herself and Pennsylvania in the New England 
factories, and with the water-ways of the State per- 
fected, even England will have to look to her laurels 
in the Central and South American States. These 
lessons come upon us plain as the noonday sun, and 
it is midsummer madness not to read them under- 
standingly. We cannot war with destiny ; we cannot 
efface the beneficent gifts of Him who leads the 
waters to the sea and sends them back in the dews 
and rains of heaven. Alabama has been gifted far 
beyond even our boasted empire of Pennsylvania, and 
only the Southern sluggard has hitherto given the 
race to the North. Now there is a New South, with 
new teachings, new opportunities, new energies, and 
manifestly a new destiny, and the time is at hand 
when a large portion of the great iron and coal 
products of the country which enter competing 



BIRMINGHAM— SOUTHERN IRON CENTRE. 



[05 



centres will be supplied cheaper from Alabama than 
from any State in the North. How Pennsylvania 
will solve the problem I do not assume to decide; 
but the logical result would be the transfer of the 
portion of the iron industry that can best prosper 
here from the North to the South, just as the spin- 
ning and weaving of the home consumption of cotton 
must soon come to the cotton-fields and the better 
water-power and climate which they furnish. 

Three trunk railway lines cross each other in Bir- 
mingham City, giving it the best railway facilities of 
any interior Southern centre, excepting only Atlanta. 
These lines, extending by main routes to the Gulf, to 
the Coast, to the East, to the Lakes, and to the West, 
and reaching every part of the country by their con- 
nections and tributaries, furnish rare facilities for the 
development of the wealth that abounds here; and 
new and important railway lines are soon to be added 
to them. And when it is considered that as railway 
outlets multiply, the great water highway by the 
Warrior River will be hastened to completion, the 
business possibilities of this region would seem in- 
credible to the North even when cautiously stated. 
Through the kindness of the Mayor and the Presi- 
dent of the Board of Trade I was enabled to visit 

lO 



I06 THE SOUTH. 

and thoroughly examine the great coal mines and 
iron establishments which have created Birmingham, 
and the universal activity and unerring signs of pros- 
perous operations present a marked contrast with our 
coal and iron centres in the North. There is a fur- 
nace here on a farm that furnishes everything neces- 
sary to make iron, — the iron ore, coal, limestone, and 
sand ; and the great beds of iron, coal, and limestone 
are in a radius of four or five miles. That these 
exhaustless sources of wealth in such close proximity 
must soon defy competition in the product of the 
ordinary iron I regard as no longer a doubtful prob- 
lem, but it is yet doubtful whether the competition 
can extend to the better qualities of iron and to steel. 
The manufacture of steel has not been attempted as 
yet, and while it is claimed that it will soon be pro- 
duced here at the same relative cost as iron, and 
equal in quality to the steel of Pennsylvania, I feel 
no assurance that it can be done at all. The faith of 
the iron men of Birmingham is so strong in its re- 
sources that they confidently claim everything for it 
possessed by any other iron district of the world, 
even to the blades of Damascus ; but here, as else- 
where in all the world, there will be material limita- 
tions upon the perfection of iron products. 



BIRMINGHAM—SOUTHERN IRON CENTRE, jq? 

Just what this vast field of as yet untested wealth 
may produce will be known only when the rattling, 
rollicking iron infant hurries on toward manhood ; 
but discounting Birmingham by all that is yet undis- 
covered as to variety of iron, it is the most inviting 
iron-field on the continent, with a coal trade in the 
near future that will be bounded only by the coal 
ports of the world; and another decade will likely 
see more than a hundred thousand population here, 
with the whole region dotted with hives of industry 
such as Birmingham is to-day. With the marvellous 
progress made here when stagnation prevailed in all 
the coal and iron centres of the North, what must be 
the strides of this industrial centre when prosperity 
comes to revivethe same industries in Pennsylvania? 
This country will draw the young men of energy 
from the coal and iron mountains of Pennsylvania, 
just as the fertile prairies of the West have drawn 
the young men of energy from our Pennsylvania 
farms, and there is room for thousands of them, 
with better prospects of success than in any new 
State or Territory of the Union. These are strong 
expressions, but I write them only after the most 
exhaustive inquiry and careful examination, and I 
know that they are fully warranted. This is the coal 



I08 THE SOUTH. 

and iron empire of the South, and, I believe, the 
future coal and iron empire of the United States ; 
and it has a climate and soil adapted to the bountiful 
growth of everything grown in Pennsylvania, with 
one-sixth of the entire cotton crop of the South 
added. It is the equal of Pennsylvania in forest, 
field, and mine, with climate, natural highways, and 
cheapness of product turning the scales in her favor. 
These are stubborn truths, and let us profit by them. 
They will not make Pennsylvania poor, for her people 
and resources are equal to any and all the mutations 
of industry and trade ; but they will make Alabama 
rich, and that will multiply the wealth and grandeur 
of the whole Union. 



MISSISSIPPI. 



The capital city of Mississippi is a good-sized vil- 
lage of five or six thousand people, with a few rusted 
and ancient-looking streets which bear evidences of 
old-time wealth and present comfort. On the gentle 
undulations which surround the now muddy centre 
that clusters about the railroad there are many fine 
Southern homes, most of them only a single story in 
height, but with the stately pillars, broad halls and 
verandas, and shades and shrubbery, which declare 
the existence of hospitality and luxury. The vener- 
able Capitol in which the supreme power of Jefferson 
Davis was felt for many years, graces the centre of 
the city, but its faded elegance adds little to the 
architectural beauty of the public and private edifices. 
Cotton is the chief staple of the State. There is a 
little wheat and corn growing in some sections, a 
little turpentine-tapping and lumbering, and a begin- 
ning at stock-growing and manufacturing, but cotton 

lo* 109 



I JO THE SOUTH. 

is the product that is relied upon. There should be 
a rapid increase of stock-growing, as the climate and 
natural grasses are specially favorable for the cheap 
and good care of cattle, and there are the same con- 
clusive reasons which are found in every cotton State 
in favor of manufacturing the cotton direct from the 
unpressed lint as it comes direct from the gin, but it 
will require time for these opportunities to be im- 
proved. 

Mississippi, like the other States south of Virginia, 
was under the reckless rule that afflicted all and des- 
olated many of the rebellious Commonwealths, but 
the Republican reign in this State was the best that 
has been known. Three Republicans filled the guber- 
natorial chair, and it is very generally admitted, even 
by their bitterest political foes, that none of them 
were personally corrupt. Governor Alcorn, the first 
Republican executive, is an old resident of the State, 
supported the Confederate cause after war had come, 
and is now a highly respected planter. He served 
only a short time as Governor, when he was elected 
to the Senate, from which body he retired to make a 
contest as a Conservative Republican against General 
Ames, who was then a Senator also. Alcorn was 
defeated by Ames, and he retired without stain upon 



MIS SIS SIP PL 1 1 1 

his record either as Governor or Senator. Powers, 
the Lieutenant-Governor, succeeded Alcorn for two 
years. He gave a free rein to the profligacy that was 
necessary to keep the colored voters and their adven- 
turous leaders together, but he is not accused of 
venality. He carpet-bagged from Ohio, but he con- 
tinues to reside in the State, and is well respected. 
General Ames, son-in-law of General Butler, had an 
exceptional opportunity for a most brilliant and use- 
ful career for himself in Mississippi, but he failed dis- 
astrously. He was sent here as military governor, 
perfected reconstruction, was elected Senator for a 
full term when barely eligible in years, and a few 
years thereafter he left the Senate to become Gov- 
ernor by election over Senator Alcorn. He was not 
a politician, and he lacked the sagacity and tact 
necessary to the successful exercise of power. He 
ruled by military orders, and would not understand 
why he could not summarily depose a judge or make 
a law for himself in civil administration under a 
government of law, as he could under the military 
order of a despotic commander. He was impeached, 
and justly impeached, for gross disregard of law, but 
he realized the peril of his position before trial, and 
resigned to escape a dishonorable dismissal. It is due 



112 THE SOUTH. 

to him to say, however, that no charge of venality was 
preferred against him, and that his personal integrity 
stands practically unchallenged. It is remarkable 
to find three reconstruction Republican Governors 
in a negro State thus free from the stain of cor- 
ruption, but Governors Alcorn, Powers, and Ames 
are fairly entitled to the creditable distinction. Po- 
litical necessities made Powers and Ames assent to 
oppressive extravagance, as the newly enfranchised 
negro was first led out of the wilderness by leaders 
who appealed to his cupidity, passions, and love of 
indolence and luxury, but they were restrained from 
the destruction of State credit. They increased taxes 
for State purposes from three mills to fourteen mills, 
created some two millions of debt, and at one time 
had State and local taxes up to four per cent, in 
many localities; but the State took the easiest and 
cheapest way out from under the load by paying it 
dollar for dollar. Thus Mississippi, the only South- 
ern State that had the imputation of repudiation 
against her before the war, is the only one that has 
emerged from reconstruction and carpet-bag rule 
without repudiating or adjusting a dollar of her 
carpet-bag debt. The State is now practically free 
from debt, excepting for a Chickasec school-fund 



MISSISSIFFI. 1 1 3 

of a million that cannot be paid, and her few bonds 
rate above par. 

Mississippi is exceptionable also in the reputable 
character of her most prominent colored leaders. In 
all the other Southern States the negro leaders have 
rivalled the white adventurers in reckless and bewil- 
dering robbery, but they have not done so in 
Mississippi. Three black men have here reached 
national fame as leaders of their race, and they are 
all esteemed as honest men. Ex-Senator Revels 
was the first black man to enter the United States 
Senate, and in Washington, as in this State, he was 
respected by all who knew him as an intelligent and 
conscientious man. He is a minister, and has never 
brought reproach upon his sacred calling, even when 
prominent as a political leader. He did not have 
much love, however, for the sinuous ways of politics, 
and he retired to the presidency of a colored college, 
where he is enabled, by annual appropriations from 
the State, to educate his race in the higher branches 
of learning. His is one of three colored educational 
institutions in Mississippi. A normal school for 
colored teachers is maintained by the State, and the 
Baptists, with State aid, are successfully conducting 
a colored college. Senator Bruce is another of the 



J 14 ^-^^ SOUTH. 

noted negro leaders of the State, and he is respected 
by all. He became rich while sheriff and tax col- 
lector of Bolivar County, and he has been accused 
of corruptly securing his election to the Senate, but 
the charge of debauching the Legislature is not sus- 
tained. He cashed the depreciated State warrants of 
his impecunious colored brethren in the Senate and 
House at par, as he could so use the warrants in 
settling his accounts as collector, and his generous 
aid thus extended to his brethren without cost to 
himself made many resolve all doubts in his favor in 
the senatorial contest, but what he did was done in 
open day, and without discrimination in favor of his 
special friends. In short, he did just about what he 
likely would have done, more or less, for his race 
had there been no Senator to elect, and the charge of 
the corrupt control of his senatorial election is not 
warranted. He is uniformly spoken of with respect 
in Mississippi, and he could reside here, prosecute 
any business, and have more social sympathy from 
the better class of whites than he could command 
in Republican Philadelphia. He was born in slavery 
in this State, and educated himself as a Mississippi 
steamer cabin-boy. Like Revels, he has never 
sought to inflame the prejudices of race; his influ- 



MISSISSIPPI. 



115 



ence has been uniformly good, and he retired from 
the Senate without the blot of shame upon his skirts. 
Another black leader of note and power is Con- 
gressman Lynch, of Natchez. He was also born in 
slavery, and could not read or write when made free 
by general emancipation, but he possesses more than 
ordinary intelligence, and he speedily mastered the 
common rudiments of education. He was Speaker 
of the first Republican House, and he soon learned 
to preside with a degree of dignity and skill that has 
seldom been equalled by the cultivated whites who 
had made the position one of considerable honor, 
as was shown by the ability with which he presided 
over the Republican National Convention at Chicago 
in 1884. He has served in the Legislature and in 
Congress, and he has not been a corruptionist. He 
differs from most of his race in a taste for severe 
frugality rather than for improvidence, and he has 
accumulated a competence, but he cannot be justly 
accused of public dishonesty. These three men, 
admittedly the most able and prominent of the black 
leaders of Mississippi, have maintained the manhood 
that should be the pride of every race, and, much 
as Mississippi has suffered from the carpet-bag and 
colored rule, there has not been a tithe of the de- 



Il6 THE SOUTH. 

moralizatioii and waste here that has dishonored the 
reign of the black man in the Carolinas and the 
Gulf States, That much of this comparatively good 
record of a bad domination is due to Revels, Bruce, 
and Lynch, who successfully breasted the waves of 
corruption, is a fact that should be confessed and 
justly appreciated. 

As Mississippi presents the most conspicuous 
cases of violent or fraudulent elections in the South, 
the subject may here be appropriately discussed. 
It is not pretended that there was any violent 
suppression or control of the negro vote in the 
late election in the South. The age of violence, as 
pictured in Judge Tourgee's " Fool's Errand," has 
passed away, and that book, while a faithful presen- 
tation of the South in the violent throes for the 
mastery of the destructive reign of the thief and 
adventurer, is now no more a true picture of the 
South than is " Uncle Tom's Cabin," in which the 
yoke of the bondman was so eloquently portrayed. 
The South had borne the merciless waste of the 
spoiler until the poverty of both races and the 
humiliation of the whites had made violence a 
comparative virtue. The Ku-Klux and the shot- 
gun did their work through the ignorant and 



MISSISSIPPI. 117 

brutal whites, who knew that their betters would 
deplore their acts but would not stay their hands. 
The law, that is as inexorable as the law of gravi- 
tation, asserted itself in the inevitable domination 
of superior intelligence and will. The hand of the 
thief was upon the throat of every property-owner, 
and public and private safety and social order im- 
peratively demanded relief The Federal govern- 
ment was voiced mainly or entirely through the 
jobbers, who made peace and the supremacy of 
law impossible, and insufferable wrongs righted 
themselves often by the worst of means. The 
question of the domination of race is now settled 
in the South, and it is settled beyond the power 
of national statutes or of official oppression or even 
of the gleaming bayonet to unsettle it. Both races 
understand it, and both are more content, more 
harmonious, and more prosperous to-day than at 
any time since the war closed. 

This State has been discreditably notable for 
political tragedies for half a century. In old ante- 
bellum times, a Vicksburg or Natchez political 
editor who escaped a twelvemonth without a bullet 
or a Bowie-knife wound, was singularly fortunate. 
It is the State that bred the Bowies and gave 



Il3 THE SOUTH. 

the world the Bowie-knife, and the bullet and the 
blade have been much more the arbiters of party- 
disputes in the past than even in the turbulent times 
since the war. The Prentisses and the Browns and 
the Davises made the duel and the street-fight 
respectable, and the ignorant accepted them with 
the greater savagery that pertains to them. The 
Chisholm and the Carrollton butcheries have their 
score of counterparts in the past political contests 
of Mississippi ; but they were not then of national 
moment. The killing of Chisholm and his daugh- 
ter was unmixed and cowardly murder, for he was 
a helpless prisoner and arraigned on what was a 
false charge, although his murderers believed it to 
be just. But even if he had been accessory to the 
Gully murder, his butchery when alone, unarmed 
and in prison, was the veriest mockery of courage 
and murder without an extenuating circumstance. 
It was in one of the proverbially lawless regions 
of the State, where poverty, ignorance, and brutality 
go hand in hand among both races, and there is 
no more law for such crimes there than there was, 
for more than ten years, in the murderous strong- 
hold of the Mollie Maguires of Pennsylvania. The 
Nixon tragedy of Yazoo was another of the regu- 



MISSISSIPPI. IIQ 

latioii Mississippi outcroppings of what has been 
bred in the bone of the primitive settlers. Nixon 
was an outlaw and a murderer, and he met the 
doom he had more than once given to his foes ; 
but it was a crime, growing out of party dispute, 
that the laws of any well-ordered community would 
restrain by punishment, while in Yazoo punishment 
is impossible. The Carrollton tragedy was the out- 
cropping of brutalized race-hatred cherished by both 
whites and blacks, in a few isolated sections. With 
these tragedies the black race has had little to do, 
nor were their rights involved in them ; but, in 
the sensitiveness of the North in regard to' all 
political tragedies in the South, they have done 
much to cloud the name of Mississippi. 

There is now great harmony between the races 
in this State. Labor is abundant and well rewarded, 
and the negroes are quite willing to take a respite 
from the turmoil and demoralization of politics. 
They tried it as a race, here as in the other South- 
ern States, and they are not disposed to take the 
field aggressively. They are gradually enlarging 
their number of owners or lessees of cotton land, 
and just as the negro gets enlisted in business he 
ceases to care about politics, and least of all to 



I20 



THE SOUTH. 



care about the more than doubtful rule of his race. 
Wealth is rapidly growing among both races in the 
State, and, while the advancement of Mississippi will 
be slower than most of the other Southern States, 
her people have everything to warrant their faith 
in a great future. 



LOUISIANA. 



Louisiana presents the most difficult shades of the 
great Southern problem that I have met with in all 
the varied aspects it offers in different communities. 
The question of race here is not entirely one of white 
and black. In part of New Orleans may be heard a 
modern Babel of tongues, — French, Spanish, German, 
Portuguese, with unintelligible English, and in the 
south and southwestern parishes the Latin race pre- 
dominates among the whites. Louisiana stood alone 
among all the old States as rejecting the common 
for the civil law ; the impress of the Latin blood is 
visible in both the Anglo-Saxon and the Ethiopian, 
and asserts itself visibly in the laws, in social regula- 
tions, and in the general policy of the Common- 
wealth. Sunday has always been the gala-day of the 
week, and the theatre, the ball, the old-time bull- 
fight, and all the devices of pleasure, are most wor- 
shipped on the day that the well-trained Anglo-Saxon 



J 22 THE SOUTH. 

holds as most sacred. The Latin blood is the old 
blood of Louisiana ; it once reigned in unmixed 
purity and unvexed authority, and it has moulded 
the accretions from stranger blood much more than 
the Saxon will confess. I differ from most of the 
many intelligent citizens of the State I have met, in 
the belief that the widened diversity of races in 
Louisiana will prove an exceptional obstacle to the 
ultimate harmony of the white and black races in 
power and prosperity. The Latin blood that long 
reigned in the Crescent City and the rich plantations 
of the Gulf, answers to the pulsations of imperial 
tastes. It is not brutal ; on the contrary, it is cul- 
tured and amiable, and it mingles more freely with 
the blood of the African than that of any other race, 
but it will rule the black man with less generous 
sympathy and co-operation for his advancement in 
citizenship than he receives even from the apostate 
Puritan. 

Next to Virginia, Louisiana suffered more than 
any of the rebellious States during the war. New 
Orleans fell into the hands of the Union forces under 
General Butler when the Confederacy was in the 
zenith of its power and promise, and it was ruled 
with the iron heel that only war can wield. Her 



LOUISIANA. 123 

commerce was cut off by the early possession of the 
Upper Mississippi and by the siege of Vicksburg, 
and thenceforth every issue of battle and every march 
of contending armies added to her humiliation and 
poverty; and when peace finally came, it found her 
people scattered from their channels of industry, her 
commerce destroyed, her wealth dissipated, and her 
ignorant slaves the masters of her richest regions,. 
There was no such diversity of labor and ownership 
in lands as prevailed in the border States and in the 
grain belts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. 
Here all is in broad plantations, where sugar, rice, 
and cotton are grown, and the small farmer was an 
unknown factor in industrial progress. Under the 
most favorable opportunities, the reorganization of 
business and trade in the face of the violent changes 
wrought by war, emancipation, and universal suf- 
frage would have been one of the most difficult 
problems of statesmanship; but when misrule and 
the studied estrangement of races by appeals to igno- 
rance, prejudice, and cupidity came as the first bitter 
legacy of war, and waste was piled upon waste by the 
long rule of the adventurer, reconstruction was in- 
definitely deferred in a tempest of demoralization. 
Louisiana was ruled by the carpet-bagger and his 



124 THE SOUTH. 

misguided ally, the black man, for ten long years, 
and no other State presents such appalling monu- 
ments of the desolation wrought by the adventurer. 
He found a people not only impoverished by the sud- 
den loss of many millions of slave property, but also 
impoverished by the fearful waste of protracted war 
within her borders, and the possession of her chief 
centres by the Union army. Her plant-ations, the 
chief source of wealth, had been overrun or aban- 
doned, and her marts of trade and wharves were 
guiltless of commerce-. He found a legitimate debt 
of some eight millions and a State credit that had 
been scrupulously maintained until no government 
was left to reflect the integrity of the people. In this 
poverty and general desolation, the scourge of the 
carpet-bagger fell upon Louisiana, and the bitter cup 
of his creation had to be drunk to the dregs. In a 
single decade the positive debt of the State was in- 
creased to twenty-five millions, and the contingent 
or guaranteed debt to many millions more, making 
an aggregate of forty millions. Nor did he content 
himself with creating debt and wasting its proceeds. 
Reckless assessors were sent out among the people 
to value property for taxable purposes, and they were 
tempted to high valuations by being paid a per- 



LOUISIANA. 



125 



centage on the amount assessed; and upon these 
valuations the taxes for State purposes alone rose as 
high as twenty-one and a half mills. Trades, occu- 
pations, professions, and indeed everything that 
earned money, were also oppressively taxed, and 
with all this revenue and all the millions of increased 
debt, the interest, the schools, and the ordinary ex- 
penses of the government could not be met. The 
wealthy parishes were all dominated by the black 
vote, under the desperate leadership of the carpet- 
baggers, and, being without property themselves and 
inflamed against the whites, they imposed as high as 
two per cent, of parish taxes in some instances, 
which, with State and town and other local taxes, 
made from five to six per cent, the rate of taxation 
in many of the wealthiest portions of the Common- 
wealth. This terrible oppression came upon a people 
that had nothing but debt and devastated property, 
and the inevitable result was wide-spread bankruptcy, 
the depreciation of values from forty to sixty per 
cent., and a general paralysis of every channel of in- 
dustry. Nor was the spoiler content with desolating 
the State. The city was rich in property and credit, 
and a legislative control of the municipal author- 
ity was assumed through legislative Park, School, 



126 THE SOUTH. 

Police, Wharf, Levee, and other Commissions, by 
which New Orleans was practically bankrupted, and 
is staggering under a debt of twenty millions, with 
but little more than two hundred thousand popu- 
lation. The Wharf Commission crippled commerce 
by exorbitant fees on trade ; the police were subordi- 
nated to partisan duties, and the schools were made a 
mockery of educational government. The legislative 
act authorizing the speculative pretence of draining 
the city at arbitrarily fixed prices from three to five 
times the legitimate cost of the work, and the legis- 
lative expenditure of ten millions for the State levees, 
during the ten years of carpet-bag rule, was lavished 
upon banded thieves by paying more than three 
times the prices now paid for the same work by the 
cubic yard. 

Such a tide of bewildering profligacy could lead 
to but one end, and that was the utter destruction 
of credit and the inexorable call for a halt. Bonds 
had depreciated to nominal prices; interest could 
not be paid because the money was stolen by the 
ruling jobbers; the resources of the people from 
which money could be wrested had wellnigh per- 
ished, and the plunderer had to take pause, as there 
was no more plunder within his reach. State bonds 



LOUISIANA. 



127 



had been recklessly issued by millions with little 
more than the color of law, and they had ceased 
to be marketable. In this utter despair of creditors, 
the Kellogg leaders, in 1874, decided to speculate 
on their own robberies, and they bought up, at 
nominal prices, the fraudulent bonds they had issued, 
and proposed to scale the whole debt, good, bad, 
and doubtful, at sixty cents on the dollar, in seven 
per cent, forty-year bonds. The old bona fide credi- 
tors of the State, who held the undisputed six 
per cent, bonds, were tempted to accept by the 
proffer of the reduced principal on increased inter- 
est, and the pools of fraudulent or doubtful bonds, 
held largely by the plunderers themselves at little 
or no cost, were promised protection against inquiry 
into their frauds and a fresh steal of many millions 
besides. They hastened to fund these bonds, and 
a constitutional amendment, declared as ratified by 
the election machinery common in Louisiana in 
those days, fastened a double fraud upon the people, 
first by a fraud upon the honest creditors, and next 
by a fraud that made millions of dishonest claims 
a constitutionally adjudicated debt of the State. 
When the Nichols government came into power 
in 1877, the disposition was very general to recog- 



128 THE SOUTH. 

nize the scaled debt, regardless of the hardly dis- 
puted fraud that created nearly or quite half of it, 
but two years of crop failures, added to the general 
prostration of values and industry under ten years 
of the most shameless robbery, made the burdens 
of government oppressive, and it was not difficult 
for the agitator to find willing hearers when he 
demanded relief from fraudulent debt. Official re- 
ports made from all the parishes showed that the 
reduction of values was fully one-half, and that by 
the derangement of labor and successive unfavor- 
able seasons for crops, the people were utterly un- 
able to maintain the schools and the necessary ex- 
penses of the government and pay seven per cent, 
interest on the funded debt. A Constitutional Con- 
vention was called, and before that body had reached 
the question of the debt an amicable arrangement 
had been practically agreed to by the creditors to 
exchange their seven per cent, bonds for new four 
per cents., which would have been an honest and 
honorable solution of the question of State credit ; 
but repudiation had tasted blood in the exercise 
of power, and an arbitrary settlement of the debt 
was made by the convention fixing interest at two 
per cent, for five years, three per cent, for fifteen 



LOUISIANA. I2Q 

years, and four per cent, thereafter, with the right 
of creditors to fund immediately in a four per cent, 
bond at an abatement of twenty-five per cent, of 
the principal. This violent action of the conven- 
tion, that embodied repudiation as one of its promi- 
nent attributes, was submitted to the people and 
ratified by a large majority. It would have been 
cheaper, much cheaper, to have borne the greater 
burdens for a few years and left their Common- 
wealth unspotted by the acceptance of the proffer 
of the creditors to receive four instead of seven 
per cent, interest. There can be but one judgment 
in regard to the arbitrary and indiscriminate re- 
duction of interest, on a principal already indiscrim- 
inately scaled down forty per cent., and that must 
be an enduring stain upon the credit of the State. 
It will not be questioned that the extenuating cir- 
cumstances have been fairly given herewith, but they 
fall far short of a reasonable excuse for what is in- 
effaceably stamped as actual repudiation. 

There is the same general condition of the two 
races in Louisiana that is to be found in all the 
Southern States where the negro is numerically equal 
or stronger than the whites, with the exception that 
there is less sympathy for and inclination to political 

12 



I30 



THE SOUTH. 



fellowship with the blacks among the old Latin blood 
than is common among the Anglo-Saxon. There is 
harmony between the races now because the pro- 
fessed friend of the negro impoverished him to starva- 
tion, and now the gradual revival of prosperity is 
greatly increasing his comfort. The utter and dis- 
graceful failure of the rule that depended upon the 
colored race for its power has left the State, like most 
of the other Southern States, practically without a 
Republican organization, and the colored vote is not 
polled in most of the parishes. Where there has 
been an opportunity for a healthy organization of 
the party it has asserted itself without molestation, 
but most of the attempted reorganizations of the 
party have been by men who very naturally pros- 
tituted the Federal service to create violent dis- 
order in their regions. There is less indication of 
division among the black voters here than in most 
of the other old Slave States, as few of them are 
property-owners and their business relations with the 
whites are not likely to become intimate here as else- 
where; but they understand that their Republican 
leaders left nothing but theft and misrule as the 
legacies of their power, and between their distrust of 
their leaders and the steady repressions by the whites, 



LOUISIANA. 



131 



they feel no interest in politics. They know that 
they cannot rule, and they know that, as they are 
now situated, they should not rule. A political cam- 
paign means grinding the black man between the 
upper and the nether millstone of thieving friends 
and brutal foes, and until there shall be a Republican 
organization in Louisiana that merits some measure 
of trust from both whites and blacks, the strength of 
the colored vote will be unfelt in elections. The 
State is very slowly recovering her "prosperity, but 
it will be the work of years to make the general 
thrift and comfort of either race that prevailed before 
the war. 

In 1785 eight bales of cotton were shipped to 
Europe. It was the first consignment of cotton from 
the New World to the Old, and it dated the advent 
of a commerce that has grown to hundreds of mil- 
lions annually, and that reaches every industrial 
centre of Europe. It is now one of the most impor- 
tant factors in clothing the world, and it gives 
employment to many millions of people in every 
progressive civilization. From the day that the 
field-hand plants the seed until it fulfils its multi- 
plied missions, from clothing both culture and bar- 
barism until it ends in the pages of the Bible in the 



132 THE SOUTH. 

heathen land or in the newspaper that reaches every 
American home, cotton is ever increasing industry, 
commerce, and thrift, and magnifying wealth and 
comfort ; and it was the centennial anniversary of the 
birth of this important product that inspired the 
New Orleans Exposition. Only a few years ago the 
South joined the peoples of the earth in celebrating 
the centennial anniversary of the immortal Declara- 
tion of Independence, and now the North is joining 
the South and the nations of Europe, of the far 
South and of the western shore of the Pacific, in 
celebrating the birth of cotton commerce. And it 
is fitly done in New Orleans, the great commercial 
centre acquired for the then infant Republic by Jef- 
ferson, the author of the matchless chart of freedom 
that has created the noblest government of man. 
By the purchase of Louisiana from France, Jeffer- 
son's far-reaching sagacity and statesmanship secured 
the source and the outlet of the Father of Waters, 
that now gathers commerce from twenty-eight States 
and Territories of the Union for this great mart of 
trade. 

The Exposition was a financial failure, but it 
accomplished great good to the nation. The gov- 
ernment was compelled to come to the rescue of the 



LOUISIANA, J 23 

original Cotton Exposition of last year to save it 
from financial collapse, but that did not deter the 
active business element of New Orleans from em- 
barking in a new Exposition to continue the present 
season. The pluck, energy, and sacrifice necessary to 
rehabilitate the Exposition were found in the Cres- 
cent City and the South, and the reorganization of 
the enterprise on the ruins of failure with liberal 
government aid, proves that Southern people under- 
stand the new order of things, and are hastening 
Southern development by wise and tireless effort. 
The opening of new channels of trade with Mexico 
and Central and South America by the Exposition 
far surpassed the most sanguine expectations of New 
Orleans, and the reorganized Exposition doubtless 
owes its existence to the growing trade with these 
countries. The Northern States have greatly under- 
valued or practically overlooked the great lesson of 
the New Orleans Exposition. It is, in fact, the gate- 
way for a new, large, and profitable trade with the 
tropical countries south of us, and had there been 
the cordial and general co-operation with New 
Orleans that the Exposition well deserved, the bene- 
fits of our enlarged trade with the South American 
countries would be almost incalculable. As it is, 

12* 



1^4 THE SOUTH. 

with both Expositions financial failures, their bene- 
ficial results will be felt in the future as we slug- 
gishly gather up the trade that could and should 
have been stimulated into immediate activity by all 
sections of the country utilizing the proffered advan- 
tages of the Exposition. 

There is one withering blight that spreads its 
baleful shadows upon the State of Louisiana, and 
that is the Louisiana Lottery Company. That it is 
only legalized robbery of the people here and else- 
where, or illegal robbery under color of law, is 
evident to all who learn from its own confession in 
official publications, that it returns to policy patrons 
little more than half the money it gathers from 
them; but when its social, political, and business 
demoralization is considered ; its systematic robbery 
of the best attributes of communities ; of the quali- 
ties of legitimate industry and of the business 
integrity that alone can make a respected and 
prosperous people, it is as " the pestilence that walk- 
eth in darkness and the destruction that wasteth at 
noonday." This corporation, whose trade was re- 
cently declared by the Philadelphia United States 
Court to be "an infamous crime," muzzles the press 
of the South, ramifies its power into political, social, 



LOUISIANA. 1^5 

and judicial circles, and multiplies the poverty of 
war among the people. It is lavish in its gifts, 
ostentatious in its charities, and generous in public 
enterprise, but the Church could as well draw its 
financial sustenance from the bawdy-house or the 
gambler's den, and hope to promote vital piety, as 
can the politics, charity, or enterprise of New 
Orleans draw tribute with self-respect from the 
lottery swindle. 



NASHVILLE— TENNESSEE. 



Of the old cities of the South, Nashville ranks 
next to Atlanta in rapid and substantial growth since 
the war. It has many signs of Northern energy 
and thrift, and it is advancing with healthy strides. 
Standing at the Capitol, where a grand panoramic 
view is presented of the undulating hills which sur- 
round the city, it looks like home to one who loves 
the mountains and valleys of Pennsylvania. The 
city proper stands on an elevation that centres in 
an almost circular valley, through which the Cum- 
berland passes, washing the skirts of the forest-clad 
hills around it : and handsome residences, colleges, 
and monuments of beneficent effort dot the elevated 
plateaus. From one view of the Capitol portico you 
see the Fisk University, where more than three 
hundred colored students, embracing both sexes, 
are being fitted as teachers of their race. Another 

view presents the Vanderbilt University, the one col- 
136 



NA SH VI L L E— TENNESSEE. 



137 



lege of the land that records a munificent charity 
by the elder Vanderbilt. The Baptist College near 
by adds its testimony to the imposing temples of 
the Fisk University, in teaching the North how the 
South outstrips the antislavery States in the educa- 
tion of the black man. On nearly every side may be 
seen the dark, heavy columns of smoke that point 
out the many hives of industry the city can boast 
of. The frowns of winter, which make the highways 
snow-bound or ice-bound in Pennsylvania, are tem- 
pered, as a rule, to gentle frosts and flitting snows 
in this latitude, and winter seems only to nestle in 
the lap of spring. There is no more beautiful city 
south of the Ohio than the capital of Tennessee. 
Its almost exceptional natural advantages and at- 
tractions have been well appreciated and developed 
by its enterprising and hospitable people, and but 
for the sable faces which divide the multitude in 
many sections of the city, the sojourner could not 
distinguish it as of the South. The exquisite eques- 
trian statue of Jackson stands close to the Capitol 
building, where the morning sunlight can make the 
dews glitter as jewels in the chaplets of the more 
than venerated chieftain, and the people of Tennessee 
must forget the devotion of their fathers before 



38 



THE SOUTH. 



another statue can divide the honor of a place in 
the beautiful Capitol grounds. 

When the war began, Tennessee owed some twenty 
millions, of which about sixteen millions were for 
railroads which were solvent and paid their interest, 
leaving about four millions as the actual debt of the 
State. But reconstruction brought to Tennessee, as 
it did to the other rebellious States, an utterly reck- 
less and profligate State rule. The erratic and des- 
perate Brownlow made himself Governor by Union 
bayonets, had a general legislative ticket voted for 
where polls could be opened, and thus made up a 
Legislature composed of some honest Union men, 
some skulkers from both armies, and an assortment 
of negroes. Some of them were declared elected 
from counties in which they did not receive a single 
vote, and where there was no pretence of an election ; 
but Brownlow wanted a government and he thus 
made it. In 1869, after two years of Brownlow's 
highly original illustration of popular government, 
he was re-elected, as he disfranchised all who had 
ever aided rebellion and appointed his own election 
officers. He then elected himself to the Senate, 
leaving Dewitt C. Senter, the Lieutenant-Governor, 
in the executive chair. Governor Senter saw that 



NA SH VI L L E— TENNESSEE. 



139 



Brownlow rule could not last, as it had given birth 
to the Ku-Klux and general insecurity to both person 
and property, and he began to conserve Republican 
authority. He was denounced by Brownlow and 
his reckless followers for his hesitation, and they 
nominated General Stokes to succeed him ; but 
Senter had learned Brownlow's ways of carrying 
elections, and he took the field against Stokes, ap- 
pointed his own election officers, and made a regula- 
tion Brownlow majority against the Brownlow party. 
Thus the rule of the adventurer was overthrown in 
1870; but meantime the Brownlow administration 
had increased the debt nearly thirty millions, making 
an aggregate of nearly fifty millions, with less than 
three hundred millions of taxable property in the 
entire State. The taxes were largely increased and 
the available resources of the State were expended, 
leaving Tennessee with a mountain of debt and gen- 
erally impoverished. In 1873 the first practical 
effort was made to adjust the debt. The^Brownlow 
government, after more than doubling the debt with 
little compensation to the State, by the issue of 
bonds to speculative railroad combinations, passed 
a law authorizing railway companies to pay their 
debt to the State in any of the State bonds. Some 



I40 



THE SOUTH. 



of the bonds were worth only nominal rates in 
market, and the solvent railways, whose bonds made 
up a considerable portion of the old debt, bought 
up the worthless bonds floating on the market and 
liquidated their accounts with the State. By this 
process and the selling out at almost total loss of 
the railroads invented by plunderers, the actual debt 
was reduced to twenty-one millions, instead of about 
four millions before the war, and that debt was 
funded at six per cent, and the interest paid for 
one year. In 1874 an additional debt of two mil- 
lions was precipitated upon the State for immediate 
payment, by the Supreme Court of the United States 
making the State liable for that amount of the notes 
of the Bank of Tennessee. The notes were receivable 
for taxes, thus reducing the revenues two millions in 
one year, and that was the feather that broke the 
camel's back. That was the end of the maintenance 
of credit in Tennessee, and the gate once opened, the 
flood increased with each year, until all debt-payers 
were swept from power, and creditors were finally 
compelled to choose between a reduction of fifty per 
cent, of profit with three per cent, interest or general 
repudiation. With all classes and interests impover- 
ished by war, with debt tainted by the creative touch 



NASHVILLE— TENNESSEE. 1 4 j 

of the adventurer, and politicians ready to appeal to 
the cupidity and necessities of the people, it is not 
surprising that when the current of repudiation is 
once started, it speedily swells to a flood -tide. 

Tennessee, like Alabama, has been greatly blessed 
in her natural gifts to invite every diversity of legiti- 
mate industry, and the hopeful promise of her future 
is in the very general interest exhibited by all classes 
of business men to promote the development of her 
vast wealth. Instead of discussing politics or wrang- 
ling over offices, the one question most earnestly dis- 
cussed in public places, in the clubs, and in social 
gatherings that draw the men of substance, is the 
best method of attracting industrial emigrants, of 
securing capital and business experience to multiply 
producing mines, furnaces, factories, farms, railways, 
and schools. An evening spent as profitably as 
pleasantly at one of the clubs of the city, dis- 
cussed only the question of how to make the 
stranger most welcome as a citizen of the State. 
The young business men of Nashville were at the 
front, and with them were the college professor, 
the journalist, the minister, and the politician of 
the New South. They have buried the past and 
its dead ; they have buried with it the traditions. 



1^2 THE SOUTH. 

the teachings, the prejudices which made the South 
the home of a few in luxury and the home of 
many in poverty. They discuss slavery only as one 
of the sad errors of their fathers, and they welcome 
emancipation as the disenthralment of the whites 
quite as much as the disenthralment of the blacks. 
They are, as a class, the men who learned in boy- 
hood, by the terrible sacrifices of war, that " hard- 
ness ever of hardiness is mother," and they have 
grown to manhood since the story of Appomattox 
was dated. They have grown up self-reliant and 
energetic, and they are about to assert themselves 
in the political and business policy of the whole 
South. Even South Carolina has a Governor who 
won his position as the founder of the liberal edu- 
cational system of the Palmetto State and not as 
a Confederate warrior, and the sudden and irresist- 
ible impetus about to be given to the material de- 
velopment of the South will speedily subordinate 
the heroes and memories of the war to the better 
achievements of peaceful progress. This element 
demands the prompt development of the diversified 
wealth of Tennessee; the early completion of her 
great water-ways; the opening of her iron, coal, 
copper, and marble deposits ; the employment of 



NASH VILLE— TENNESSEE. 



143 



her immense water-powers to whirl the spindle and 
drive the loom and forge-hammer, and they want 
just protection for the industries of the nation. 
More than that, they will have what they need 
if united and manly effort can attain it, regardless 
of partisan leaders or free-trade dreamers. 

No intelligent business man from Pennsylvania 
can carefully examine the natural resources of Ten- 
nessee and Alabama without seeing the hand of 
destiny that is soon to mark a revolution in the 
iron and coal trade of this country.- While in the 
single struggle for the mastery in iron and coal 
product, Alabama has in some measure the advan- 
tage of Tennessee as a great centre of those com- 
modities, this State surpasses Alabama in the sur- 
roundings of mineral wealth, which can be profitably 
developed by manufacturing. The soil of Tennessee 
is better than that of Pennsylvania, and capable of 
every growth we can boast of in the Keystone 
State, with cotton added in a large belt of the 
southern portion. It has all the diversity of hills, 
valleys, and water-courses, with a more congenial 
climate. East Tennessee has as just claim to be 
called the Switzerland of America as has Northern 
Pennsylvania. In addition to fourteen thousand 



144 '^^^ SOUTH, 

square miles of productive lands and half a million 
population, it has one hundred and fifty miles of 
navigable waters leading to the great commercial 
centres of the South. Middle Tennessee, although 
an inland country, with nearly a million people, 
has five hundred miles of navigable waters ; has four 
thousand square miles containing iron ore, and was 
an iron-producing region before the war of 1812. 
West Tennessee borders on the Father of Waters, 
that will evermore, I trust, **go unvexed to the 
sea," and these natural highways are certain to 
hasten the mastery of the South in mineral prod- 
ucts which have hitherto been most successfully 
produced in the North. I have in a previous chapter 
explained how the opening of the Warrior River, 
at a cost of less than is annually wasted on the 
River and Harbor bill on mud creeks, would open 
the great Alabama coal- and iron-fields to the world. 
It was urged by John Quincy Adams when Presi- 
dent, but diversified industry and slavery were foes, 
and the more importunate North and West took 
the appropriations. In like manner the great iron- 
and coal-fields of Tennessee have been shut out 
from the markets of the world by the mussel shoals 
in the Tennessee River, although Tennessee has 



NASHVILLE— TENNESSEE. j.c 

had Jackson, Polk, and Johnson as Presidents, and 
could and should have had an uninterrupted water- 
way to the Gulf half a century ago. But neces- 
sity is an impressive teacher, and now Tennessee 
will successfully demand the improvement of her 
obstructed natural highway. Then her iron and 
coal, more abundant and more easy of access than 
the iron and coal of Pennsylvania, will enter every 
competing centre, and her marble, more than ample 
to rebuild the Appian Way of Rome, as Balie 
Peyton elegantly expressed it at our Philadelphia 
Centennial, will enrich the architecture of every 
civilization. These improvements are near at hand, 
and they will date the successful rivalry of the 
South in the great mineral products of Pennsyl- 
vania. 

The iron trade in Tennessee is no new enter- 
prise. As early as 1810 charcoal iron was pro- 
duced in Middle Tennessee, and there were thirty- 
five charcoal-furnaces in successful operation here 
in i860. A full half-century ago, in 1832 I believe, 
the Philadelphia Franklin Institute made a series of 
tests of the various qualities of iron in the American 
markets, and declared the iron of Tennessee equal to 
the Swedish iron in ductility and firmness of tex- 

13* 



146 



THE SOUTH. 



ture ; and it is one of the traditions of the State 
that no Mississippi River steamboat boiler made 
of Tennessee iron was ever exploded. In both coal 
and iron it is evident that we have no advantage 
in quality in Pennsylvania over Tennessee, except 
as we employ foreign ores to improve our native 
product; but as water navigation to the very heart 
of the iron- and coal-fields of Alabama and Ten- 
nessee will offer cheaper facilities for the mixture 
of foreign ores with the native ores of the South, 
the advantages of quality we now possess are not 
enduring. Tennessee has over five thousand square 
miles of the great Appalachian coal-field of the con- 
tinent; it has four thousand square miles containing 
rich red and brown hematite ores, and, like Ala- 
bama, it has the iron, coal, and limestone in close 
proximity. The highest estimate I have had from 
experienced iron men as the average cost of pro- 
ducing iron in this State is eleven dollars and fifty 
cents per ton, and many claim that every well- 
appointed and managed furnace produces it as low 
as ten dollars and sixty cents. Birmingham now 
ships iron to Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and New Eng- 
land, as 1 saw by the books of leading furnace men 
there; but Birmingham and Tennessee now control 



NASHVILLE— TENNESSEE. i^y 

the iron markets of the large iron-consuming iStates 
of Indiana and Illinois. Birmingham can ship to 
Philadelphia or New York by rail to Charleston or 
Savannah, and thence by water, for three dollars and 
eighty cents per ton ; it can reach Indianapolis for 
three dollars and seventy-five cents, and Tennessee 
can reach the West for a little less. „ These are the 
rates with the present necessarily expensive transpor- 
tation ; and what will be increased advantage of Ten- 
nessee and Alabama in coal and iron, when multiplied 
capital and riper experience and largely increased 
product shall cheapen both the product and its trans- 
portation? These facts present a grave problem to 
the great coal and iron industries of the North, and 
they must and will be squarely and intelligently 
looked in the face. I do not fear that the South will 
destroy the coal and iron industries of Pennsyl- 
vania, for that is impossible; but I am convinced 
that it will speedily revolutionize both. Business 
follows natural laws as surely as the stars follow 
their appointed courses in the heavens, and I look 
for the North to hasten the transfer of much of 
its capital and business experience to the virgin 
and more inviting coal- and iron-fields of Tennes- 
see and Alabama. It will be done because the 



148 



THE SOUTH. 



obsta«ies of slavery, of civil war, and of lingering 
distrust, which have hitherto been insuperable, are 
about to perish, and North and South will be bound 
together by the indissoluble ties of business interest. 



FLORIDA— ORANGE-GROWING. 



The Goddess of Romance illumines the history of 
Florida. It was the earliest of all the discoveries on 
the Western continent; was explored from the mouth 
of the St. John to the Father of Waters by De Soto 
nearly three and a half centuries ago, and he was 
only the follower of Ponce de Leon, who had taken 
possession of it in 15 12 in the name of the Spanish 
king and named it the Land of Flowers. Before the 
Revolutionary war with Britain, the warriors of Eng- 
land and Spain had two centuries of battle for the 
possession of Florida, that was ended by Spain 
ceding the territory to the United States nearly 
seventy years ago. Soon after our acquisition of the 
long-disputed country a bloody Indian war followed, 
lasting nearly a decade, until Osceola, the famed 
Seminole warrior chief, pined his restless life away 
as a prisoner in Charleston. Hard by historic Fort 

Moultrie the savage warrior sleeps, conquered only 

149 



ISO 



THE SOUTH. 



by death, and shattered remnants of his once proud 
and heroic tribe now wander through the Everglades, 
guiltless of war-paint and battle-axe. It is a strange 
story that this first discovered, explored, and settled 
portion of the continent was comparatively an un- 
known country for three hundred years after its dis- 
covery, and when Florida was admitted as a State 
half a century ago, it was as a political necessity to 
strengthen the South in the Senate, rather than as 
an aid to the development of a new Commonwealth. 
Little progress was made in Florida until after the 
late civil war, when its genial climate, its bountiful 
orchards and gardens, its perennial verdure and flow- 
ers, its grand forests, its romantic rivers, its more 
than a thousand miles of sea-coast, and its restful 
and recuperating winter resorts for invalids, began to 
attract Northern visitors to this lovely winter garden 
of the Union. The St. John's River is one of the 
great natural water highways of the country. Unlike 
all others, it flows from the far Southern coast north- 
ward, and while its whole line is not over four hun- 
dred miles, its tributaries give it a thousand miles of 
navigation. Its upper waters present a series of navi- 
gable lakes some of which are several miles in 
breadth, and it closely hugs the ocean in its whole 



FL OR IDA— ORANGE- GR O WING. 



151 



course as it comes to greet the waters of the North, 
with its banks luxuriant in tropical growth. The 
quaint old city of St. Augustine, below the mouth of 
the great river, is rich in legend and romance. More 
than half a century before the tread of the Pilgrims 
on Plymouth Rock, Menendez had founded his col- 
ony there, and built up a fortified city only to be 
pillaged and destroyed by Drake, the British free- 
booter, as Menendez had exterminated the Hugue- 
nots south of the St. John's by flame and sword a few 
years before ; but the Spaniard rebuilt his city and 
Fort San Marco, that resisted every assault in the 
conflicts of Spain and England, even when the city 
was captured. Its historic City Gate, with its antique 
towers, is the lingering relic of the old wall that 
crossed the little peninsula to defend the often as- 
sailed first city of North America. 

The people of the North know Florida chiefly as 
the land of oranges, and there is a flavor of romance 
about orange-growing that captivates the plodding 
husbandman and entices the fancy farmer. It seems 
to be such a delectable occupation, where little labor 
among perennial verdure and fragrant blossoms is 
supposed to produce a bountiful harvest of doubly 
golden fruit, and thousands have plunged headlong 



152 



THE SOUTH. 



into it, both as small farmers ready to do their own 
work, and as speculative or fancy tillers of the 
Florida soil, while comparatively few have realized 
their expectations of profit and many have given up 
in despair or bankruptcy. These experiences are in 
no degree the fault of the orange-growing industry, 
but they are precisely the experiences that Southern 
orange-growers or cotton-planters would meet if they 
attempted Pennsylvania or Western farming with 
their limited knowledge of the methods by which 
Northern agriculture is made profitable. Orange- 
growing is just like the growing of wheat, corn, pota- 
toes, oats, cotton, rice, or tobacco; it must be under- 
stood, and understood in the most practical way, to 
make it pay; and that understanding must apply 
as well to the selection of the particular soil and 
climate of Florida as to the planting, rearing, till- 
ing, fertilizing, and generally caring for the orchards 
which are expected to bring fortune to the owner. 
Orange-orchards thus selected or planted and thus 
handled with the intelligence and fidelity they need 
are among not only the most profitable, but also 
among the most certain crops grown on the con- 
tinent. I present this statement with the full knowl- 
edge, gained largely by personal investigation, that 



FL OR ID A— ORANGE- GR O WING. 



153 



more than half the entire orange crop of this year 
has been destroyed. The loss of the orange-growers 
this winter is not less than one million dollars from 
the destructive winter, and the loss of early vege- 
tables is from half a million to a million more; but 
this large loss to dishearten the Florida orange- and 
vegetable-growers, has led to exhaustive inquiry into 
the comparative losses of staple crops in all sections 
of the country, and it clearly proves that there is no 
State in the Union where crops are more certain or 
more profitable than in Florida, and of these, the 
more delicate products, which have suffered so se- 
verely this winter, are among the most certain and 
profitable of all. When it is remembered that the 
destructive frost of this winter in Florida has not 
been known since 1835, or for more than half a cen- 
tury, and that there is not a staple crop of the North 
that is not half destroyed once in five years by some 
of the many causes which reduce or kill the growing 
crops of Northern fields, the intelligent reader will 
understand the logic of my conclusions. 

Hap-hazard orange-growing is just like hap-hazard 
wheat- or corn-growing. Sometimes it will happen 
to pay ; but generally it will not pay, and the disap- 
pointed farmer is usually ready to blame everything 

14 



154 



THE SOUTH. 



but himself when he alone is in fault. There is no 
more inviting State than Florida for the laboring 
man who aims to acquire a small farm and do his 
own work, as do most Western settlers. A small 
orange grove well located, well planted, well tilled, 
and well cared for, all of which are within the 
capacity of the owner himself, is certainly the easiest 
and surest way to increase the value of both plant 
and product. It will require five to eight years 
before profitable crops of oranges can be gathered, 
but good orange land is capable of producing all 
the necessaries of life, except wheat, with less labor 
than even on the prairies of the West. Beef and 
pork can be raised with little cost beyond the orig- 
inal investment, and the fact that they can be raised 
so easily, seems to forbid the little effort and care 
needed to raise them well. The small farmer has 
everything to invite him to Florida, but he is of a 
class that is most liable to be deceived and robbed 
by the land speculators who are thick as flies where 
there are opportunities for plying their vocation. 
There are millions of acres of land in Florida, 
which are valueless, at least for the present genera- 
tion, and of the many millions which are really 
valuable, wise discrimination is necessary in select- 



FL OR IDA— OR A NGE- GR O WING. 



155 



ing lands for orange and vegetable culture. In the 
Indian River region, it would be easy for any one 
of ordinary intelligence to select profitable lands, 
but those lands now cost as much per acre as do 
the model farms of Lancaster County. It has been 
the home of the most luscious orange of the world 
for years, and it is there that strawberries are grown 
in perfection in open air in mid-winter and com- 
mand two dollars a quart in the Northern cities. 
It is simply perpetual summer, and the tropical 
fruits are grown there in profusion ; but the small 
farmer, seeking a home to be built up by his own 
patient labor, can't afford to purchase Indian River 
farms, and he must go into some of the other prom- 
ising sections of the State. Fortunately, they are 
abundant. They don't offer the climate and products 
of the Indian River region, but they offer probably 
as great results from the same investment. It is in 
the selection of land in Florida that the first danger 
to the immigrant is presented. As a rule he has 
neither the means nor the knowledge of the State 
necessary to select just what he needs, and he can 
buy apparently good land, give it the labor and 
the care that should give him good returns, and yet 
fail in his undertaking. The soil is more variable 



156 



THE SOUTH. 



than the climate. Some portions possess the proper 
qualities and surroundings to produce good orange 
crops with the minimum amount of outlay and 
labor, and others, apparently equally inviting, will 
require costly fertilizing or irrigation, or both, to 
produce abundant crops. Farms of from twenty to 
forty acres are large enough for successful small 
farming, and small farming is the most substantial 
and profitable enterprise in the growth of a State. 
The mere speculator comes and goes and seldom 
benefits either land or people ; but the small farmer 
comes to stay ; to multiply wealth ; to found com- 
munities, commerce, railways, newspapers, schools, 
and churches, and he is the greatest source of both 
public and private wealth. When he fails, the State 
feels it, for failure in the community chills the pul- 
sations of the heart of the Commonwealth. 

I could not instruct any person how to grow the 
orange successfully, as I am quite as ignorant of the 
tree and its needs as are nine-tenths who attempt 
to grow it and fail ; but I have learned enough to 
know how much the orange-grower must learn 
before he can depend upon his orange-orchards for 
profit. While there is absolutely greater certainty 
of crops and of profit in orange farming in Florida 



FLORIDA— OKA NG E- GR O WING. j 5 y 

than in any farming in the North, the orange-tree 
is a coy and wayward growth, and needs intelh'gent 
and affectionate caressing. It is neither difficult to 
manage nor abstruse in the theories which make 
it an appreciative and profitable pet ; but its soil 
and its wants must be understood, and its wants 
must be supplied ; but even the labor and expen- 
diture necessary to bring it to the highest perfec- 
tion should be profitable. The best possible cul- 
ture of the infant orange-orchard is the growth of 
vegetables, etc., from the soil while the trees are 
pushing forward to the bearing period ; and thus, 
while the farmer is giving his orange-trees the 
cultivation and fertilizers they need, he can be 
gathering his three crops a year of the necessaries 
of life. Instead of waiting a year for results, as 
must the small farmer of the West, and be brought 
to the verge of starvation by a single fatal visita- 
tion of untimely frost or of the cyclone or the 
grasshopper, he can begin any season of the year 
and have his corn and vegetables on his table in 
three months, and be giving to his orange-trees the 
attention they so scrupulously demand. But the 
orange is as bountiful in variety as is the apple, 
and soil, climate, and variety of fruit must be in 



158 



THE SOUTH. 



harmony, or the results will be unsatisfactory. The 
same is true of most crops of the field in the 
North and West; but the fruits and vegetables of 
Florida are much more delicate than the staple 
crops of the Northern farmer, and adaptability of 
variety of crop to particular soil and climate is 
imperative here, while it is only a question of 
degree of success or failure in the North. The 
State presents the distinct features of semi-tropical, 
sub-tropical, and tropical climate. From Jackson- 
ville southward there is a more and more sunny 
clime until the keys south of Biscayne Bay are 
absolutely frostless, but they, with the sub-tropical 
region still dominated by the fragments of the 
Seminole, are not yet inhabited by settlers. The 
medium between the semi-tropical and the tropical 
is commonly spoken of as beyond the frost-line, 
but it is a fiction, of course, although frost is sel- 
dom serious and never destructive of entire crops 
of oranges and vegetables, as was common in the 
northern section this year. With new settlements 
now rapidly extending southward, and with rail- 
ways rapidly following the lines of improvement, 
the settler can get beyond serious peril from frost, 
and can, in most instances, protect his crops. Thus 



FL OR IDA— ORANGE- GR O WING. j Cq 

climate, soil, and variety of fruit all enter into 
successful orange-growing, and almost every variety 
of semi-tropical climate and soil are now open to 
the settler at lower rates than land equally acces- 
sible to markets can be obtained anywhere in the 
West. 

Very few people in the North have any intelli- 
gent conception of the orange industry of Florida. 
It is less than a quarter of a century since the 
Florida orange became an important article of com- 
merce, and it is now much less than one-tenth the 
product of the orange-orchard consumed in the 
United States. Florida harvested eighty millions 
of oranges in 1885, and would have harvested 
more than that number this year but for the de- 
structive winter, while we import seven hundred 
millions annually, chiefly from Sicily, California 
grows a large orange crop, but the cost of trans- 
portation has hindered it from reaching the market 
east of the great mountains. Here is the great 
orange-field of the continent ; the orchards which 
produce the finest fruit of the world, and the future 
of the Florida orange product almost defies calcu- 
lation. Fully two-thirds of the orange-orchards of 
the State are under ten years of age, and half that 



l5o ^iHE SOUTH. 

number, or one-third of the whole, are not five 
years old. Most of the old and bearing orchards 
have been grown carelessly, and their product is 
lessened both in quantity and quality by the failure 
to appreciate the necessity of growing the best 
trees in the best soil and in the best manner; but 
the orchards now beginning to bear, and the younger 
ones, have, as a rule, been located, planted, and 
nurtured with intelligent care, and they, and the 
rapidly-multiplying orchards of the early future, 
must revolutionize the orange trade within another 
score of years, and exclude the less-inviting foreign 
fruit from our markets. Neither the oldest inhabi- 
tants nor even tradition can fix the period when 
the orange-tree gives up its work. It will bear 
in from six to twelve years from the seed, or two 
years earlier from the average nursery twig, accord- 
ing to climate. The Kissimmee tree will bear three 
years earlier than the Jacksonville tree, and as the 
orange cultivation extends southward, the tree 
hastens the bearing period. The first crop from a 
tree in fair bearing condition will be about two 
hundred, and with proper care its crop will in- 
crease from twenty to forty per cent, for twenty 
or thirty years. There are trees in the State 



FLORIDA— ORANGE-GROWING. i5i 

which bear ten thousand oranges yearly, and many 
which bear five thousand, but they are exceptional, 
of course. It needs only a little use of simple 
arithmetic to prove that the orange crop of Florida 
must reach ten millions of dollars annually in a 
few years, instead of the present product of two 
millions, and as the orange product increases all 
other products must steadily increase, although in 
a less ratio of value, and the rapidly-increasing 
facilities for transportation, and the accepted superi- 
ority of the Florida fruit, must ever maintain profit- 
able markets for this now important and swiftly- 
increasing product. 

I have specially discussed the question of orange- 
growing from the stand-point of the small farmer, 
as that is the class that Florida most needs, and it 
is the class that most needs Florida. The same 
general laws which govern successful orange-grow- 
ing for small farmers govern the industry in all its 
phases; but the capitalist who mingles pleasure and 
healthful winter enjoyment with profit, is generally 
able to select his location and invest wisely. There 
are a number of such orange plantations on the 
St. John's, which pay largely on the investment, 
besides furnishing beautiful and healthful winter 



1 62 THE SOUTH. 

homes for their owners, and the whole line of the 
railway from Sanford south to Kissimmee City is 
beautified by attractive winter homes with orange- 
orchards either beginning to bear or giving promise 
of early and bountiful crops. Just as settlements 
and railways extend southward will the orange- 
orchards extend with them, and better fruit and 
surer profits will be attained. The Florida orange 
industry is indeed a wonderful development, al- 
though yet in its infancy, and the present genera- 
tion will see it the first in value of the products 
of the State, instead of falling behind cotton, lumber, 
and corn, as it does now. 



FLORIDA— HEALTH AND PRODUCTS. 



Startling as is the transformation of Florida in 
many other sections of the State, in St. Augustine, 
the oldest city of the continent, that lay dormant 
for nearly three centuries, the march of improve- 
ment as a popular winter resort is obviously taking 
the lead. Two years ago it was deemed a doubt- 
ful enterprise to build the San Marco House, capa- 
ble of giving first-class entertainment to three or 
four hundred guests, but it is now about to be 
obscured by the Ponce de Leon, to cost a million 
dollars for the structure alone, with probably half as 
much more to furnish and beautify, and it is not 
doubted that its thousand guests will be ready for 
it as soon as it can be opened next season. There 
are a full score of large hotels in the State which 
equal or surpass the best class of summer resort 
hotels in the North in all the essential qualities of 

comfort, and the smaller hotels and boarding-houses 

163 



164 THE SOUTH, 

of various grades which are sought by invalids in 
search of quiet and rest and by visitors of mod- 
erate means are reckoned by the hundreds. Not 
only in Jacksonville and St. Augustine are the 
hotels of the very best class in all respects, but ele- 
gant hotels abound at Palatka, Sanford, Enterprise, 
Winter Garden, Orlanda, Kissimmee, and many 
other places on the St. John's River and on the new- 
lines of railroad. The hotels throughout Florida 
within range of Northern visitors are vastly better 
than the hotels of the prominent inland cities of 
Pennsylvania or New York or New England, and 
in the chief centres they rival the more pretentious 
hotels of Philadelphia and New York in the excel- 
lence of their table and the comfort of their rooms. 
But even these hotels, which were deemed extrava- 
gant ventures only a few years ago, will now be 
eclipsed by the Ponce de Leon of St. Augustine, 
which will be comparable only with the hotel 
palaces of the Pacific coast in colossal proportions, 
grandeur, and completeness in all appointments ; and 
what shall now be done in St. Augustine will be 
speedily imitated, only on a lesser scale of expen- 
diture, in the localities which are rapidly developing 
as permanent centres of Northern visitors. I hazard 



FLORIDA— HEALTH AND PRODUCTS. 



165 



little in saying- that the present generation will see 
scores of hotels in Florida far outstripping the most 
popular and costly watering-places of the North 
alike in number and elegance. There is only one 
Florida in North America. It was until lately far 
distant from the North, but now swift express trains 
with almost every comfort of home, and rapid coast 
steamers from every Northern commercial port, have 
brought the " Land of Flowers" within easy reach 
of pleasure-seekers and invalids; and the prospect 
of profitable investments has turned a steadily 
growing tide of all classes of money - getters to 
Florida, from the conservative capitalist to the head- 
long speculator. These lessons of the future of the 
State are clearly visible to the intelligent observer 
even in the severest winter desolation that Florida 
has known for half a century, and each year will 
vindicate the view I present with surprising and 
substantial certainty. 

While the tide of invalids from the North to the 
softer winter climate of Florida is rapidly multi- 
plying, there is a popular apprehension that miasma 
prevails in the State and that malarial fevers are 
likely to greet the settler in many sections. It is 
the natural assumption of those who are not fully 

15 



1 56 THE SOUTH, 

informed on the subject, that a new country abound- 
ing in lakes, lagoons, and other bodies of water 
overflowing their channels or without apparent 
channels of outlet, must breed malaria ; but in 
point of fact, as proved alike by reason and well- 
tested experience, there is less malaria in Florida 
than in Pennsylvania; much less than in the new 
Western States or in the other coast States of the 
South. Two-thirds of the State is a peninsula across 
which sweep the healthy breezes from Gulf to 
Ocean, and there are no mountains to impede their 
progress. The highest altitude does not reach five 
hundred feet above tide, and no part of Florida, 
except the extreme northern line, is ever free from 
the flavor of the sea. This fact considered in con- 
nection with the general absence of stagnant waters, 
dispels the theory of a malarial atmosphere. Instead 
of the stagnant and putrid waters of the North and 
West, Florida has countless subterranean currents of 
the fresh waters from the Appalachian range, which 
furnish flowing wells of pure water by driving down 
through soft earth from three to five hundred feet, 
and these underground lakes feed and drain most 
of the lake regions of the State. Jacksonville has 
an ample supply of water from several flowing wells 



FLORIDA— HEALTH AND PRODUCTS, 



167 



just on the edge of the city, none of which is four 
hundred feet in depth. Of course, there is malaria 
in Florida if the visitor is foolish enough to hunt 
for it. There are marshes here as elsewhere ; the 
rapid flow of immigration and the sudden cultiva- 
tion of hundreds of thousands of acres ; the false 
economy that accepts surface water for drinking 
when wholesome water can be obtained anywhere 
much cheaper from wells than in Pennsylvania, 
and the indolence that invites the disorders of the 
Florida limestone water in the sections where that 
soil prevails, must produce light fevers here as they 
would produce graver disease in the North ; but there 
is no new State in which sickness is less common 
than it is in Florida, and there is no other State 
in which the diseases peculiar to the region can be 
so easily and so effectually guarded against. One 
of the most prolific sources of ill health among 
settlers from the colder climate of the North is the 
unwillingness to learn that the strong diet neces- 
sary there is not only not needed here, but is the 
source of many physical disorders. The Pennsyl- 
vania mountaineer can thrive on his pork, sausage, 
and buckwheat cakes swimming in grease, but when 
he seeks the climate of Florida, he must obey the 



1 58 THE SOUTH, 

law of nature that adapts the growth of the cHmate 
to the needs and comfort of the husbandman. Sur- 
geon-General Lawton justly declared that "Florida 
possesses a much more agreeable and salubrious 
climate than any other State or Territory in the 
Union," and he answered the question of the alleged 
malarial nature of the atmosphere by official sta- 
tistics, showing that while in the Middle division of 
the United States the percentage of deaths from re- 
mittent fever is one in thirty-six ; in the Northern 
division one in fifty-two ; in the Southern division 
one in fifty-four ; in Texas one in seventy-eight ; and 
in California one in one hundred and forty-eight, in 
Florida it is only one in two hundred and eighty- 
seven. Considering that the summers in Florida are 
long and often severely trying, with the natural 
causes which would produce epidemics in the North 
in the absence of complete drainage and wholesome 
water, it is no less marvellous than true that the 
general healthfulness of Florida surpasses that of 
any other State in the Union. Judging from the 
causes which would be productive of fevers and 
general ill-health in the North, malaria and the 
many disorders which attend it would naturally be 
expected in the large portion of Florida just re- 



FLORIDA— HEALTH AND PRODUCTS. 



69 



claimed from water by the great Disston enterprise. 
I saw a thriving little city at Kissimmee where the 
present streets were passable only in boats three 
years ago, and around it thousands of acres rescued 
from the bottom of the lakes and much of it now 
under cultivation ; but fevers are almost unknown, 
and the first case of sunstroke, pneumonia, diph- 
theria, smallpox, or yellow fever has yet to occur. 
The laboring force employed by the Philadelphia 
Draining Company is composed entirely of white 
men, many of whom are from the North, and the 
last official report of Chief Engineer James M. 
Kreamer, well known in Philadelphia, makes the 
remarkable statement that in all their operations 
since 188 1, "there has never been a death from 
any cause, and a physician in a professional capa- 
city has never visited our work." The drainage, 
exposure, and cultivation of such an area on the 
Susquehanna, Juniata, or Delaware Rivers, would 
depopulate the region by deadly malaria. 

The more I have seen of and inquired into the 
general product of labor in Florida, the more I am 
impressed with the advantages this State presents to 
actual settlers over the far West, and even over all 
the other Southern States. When I first publicly 

15* 



lyQ 7 HE SOUTH. 

suggested, five years ago, that the day is not distant 
when the tide of surplus labor, from both our own 
and foreign lands, must turn from the West to the 
South, there were few who credited it, while many 
vigorously combated it. Even intelligent men in the 
South, fully appreciating the need of actual settlers 
and earnestly desiring to encourage them, gave little 
credence to the prediction, while both North and 
West generally resented it; but what was discredited 
prophecy then is rapidly shaping into history now. 
The surplus young men from our Pennsylvania farms 
have not yet turned Southward in any considerable 
numbers, but their forerunners are now rearing cot- 
ton-mills, furnaces, machine-shops, and railways in 
the reconstructed States, and the farmer will follow as 
surely as day succeeds the night. The next decade 
will see scores of thousands of our surplus skilled 
laborers settled in the South ; capital will bring them 
to the more inviting and certain fields of investment, 
and the tide of both home and foreign immigration 
that seeks lands for homes, will soon learn to prefer 
the cheaper lands of the South with better markets 
and the best possible product of a given amount of 
labor. The wheat-, corn-, and stock-growers have a 
vast domain open to them in the Virginias, the Caro- 



FLORIDA— HEALTH AND PRODUCTS. 171 

linas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, which have 
their tobacco, cotton, and rice belts, with boundless 
mineral wealth, and Florida adds to cotton, corn, rye, 
oats, and lumber her matchless fruits and vegetables, 
which are only in the infancy of the product. The 
severity of the Western climate, the absolute disaster 
to the farmer when a crop is lost, the cost of pro- 
tecting stock and maintaining comfort in the long 
winters, and the great distance from the consuming 
centres of the country, all point to the productive 
lands, the genial climate, and the general prolific 
results of labor in the South as certain to make new 
highways for immigration and a new departure in the 
growth and development of the Southern States east 
of Kentucky and Mississippi. And of all these, Flor- 
ida must certainly grow in favor as its climate and 
resources become better understood. The older por- 
tion of the State, embracing the highlands of which 
Tallahassee is the centre, is rich as any of the other 
cotton States, but is ragged and worn by the indo- 
lence and bad farming which belonged to slavery. 
Farming is so easy, and middling crops can be gath- 
ered with such a small amount of labor, that little 
is done in the way of improving the soil by diversity 
and succession of crops, and stock-growing is neg- 



1^2 THE SOUTH. 

lected because it would require one-fourth the labor 
and expenditure to make equal returns with stock- 
growing in the North and West. All the chief prod- 
ucts of the Pennsylvania farm, with the exception of 
wheat, timothy, and clover, can be grown with about 
half the labor and with greater certainty in harvests, 
and to them can be added the long-fibred or sea- 
island cotton, tobacco, upland rice, with pears and 
peaches in perfection, and oranges with moderate 
results. But it is the new Florida that has been de- 
veloped within the last few years that I regard as the 
most inviting part of the whole continent for the 
small farmer who can adapt himself to its climate and 
the simple but systematic method of culture that here 
produces the best results for labor to be found in any 
State of the Union. As yet its products are but im- 
perfectly developed. While the orange alone is the 
most profitable of crops when wisely located and sen- 
sibly handled, there is no orange land that will not 
produce other semi-tropical fruits and vegetables in 
abundance, in from two to four crops each year, with 
corn and potatoes and the best grasses for the growth 
of stock, and it is admitted by the sugar-planters of 
Louisiana that the reclaimed lands of Florida will be 
the most productive and profitable sugar lands this 



FLORIDA— HEALTH AND PRODUCTS. 170 

side of Cuba. I have given this subject as careful 
personal observation and inquiry as was possible in a 
brief visit to the State ; and I feel fully warranted in 
the opinions I have expressed as to the climate, re- 
sources, products of labor, healthfulness, and rapid 
and permanent growth and prosperity of Florida. 



FLORIDA'S RECLAIMED LANDS. 



The great impetus given to Florida within the 
last few years is chiefly due to the bold and 
practical business enterprise of Hamilton Disston, 
of Philadelphia. It has long been known that the 
most valuable lands of the State are flooded by a 
succession of lakes beginning with Lake Tohope- 
kaliga at Kissimmee and the little lake of the same 
name a short distance to the northeast, and ex- 
tending through Lakes Hatchenaha, Cypress, Kis- 
simmee, thence by the Kissimmee River to Lake 
Okeechobee, the largest body of water in any one 
State of the Union, and thence by canal to the 
point where the Caloosahatchee River has channel 
enough to carry these surplus waters to the Gulf 
of Mexico at Punta Rassa, or the mouth of the 
Caloosahatchee. This outlet is but little south of 
Charlotte Harbor, that is destined to be the lead- 
ing coast-port for trade and travel to Cuba, as it 
174 



FLORIDA'S RECLAIMED LANDS. 



175 



is some five hours nearer Havana than Tampa, 
with better waters for commerce. The Peninsula 
Railroad, extending from Plant City, on the Tampa 
line, to Charlotte Harbor, has just been opened 
with imposing ceremonies, in which Governor Perry 
and other prominent men participated, and its com- 
pletion opens the way for trade, travel, and settlers 
to one of the richest sections of the State, while 
the canals and straightened channels cut between 
the overflowing lakes by the Disston enterprise, 
open direct and easy water navigation from the 
Gulf at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee through 
the very heart of the extreme southern part of the 
State that is inhabited or inhabitable. South of 
Lake Okeechobee and the Caloosahatchee are the 
two counties of Monroe and Dade, containing the 
great Cypress Swamp and the Everglades, both of 
which extend to the end of the peninsula, and will 
probably never have anything more than irregular 
inhabitants at certain points on the coast. 

It is no new idea that has been put into prac- 
tical operation by the Disston company to reclaim 
the more than eight millions of acres which have 
long been known as the most productive and intrin- 
sically valuable lands of the State. Public attention 



176 



THE SOUTH, 



was attracted to the subject nearly forty years ago 
by General Jessup and other officers who had given 
long public service in Indian wars and as govern- 
ment engineers. General Jessup reported in 1848 
that the drainage of these lands was entirely prac- 
ticable, and that when drained they would become 
as valuable sugar plantations as any in the world. 
Government engineers subsequently proved what 
"was then generally believed, that the glades are 
sufficiently elevated to be drained, and the careful 
and completed surveys of the Disston organization 
prove that there is a regular fall of nearly fifty 
feet from Kissimmee City, the head of the enter- 
prise, to the Caloosahatchee, that is the outlet for 
the lakes when connected by canal between Lake 
Okeechobee and the river. The great lake had no 
visible outlet until opened by canal to carry its 
waters to the river, and to that canal will be added 
another on the east side, tapping the lake near its 
northeast corner and running eastward to the At- 
lantic coast at the confluence of the St. Lucie and 
the Halpotyokee Rivers. But while this body of 
land of almost incalculable value was well known 
to the South, and especially to its sugar-planters, 
its reclamation was never seriously thought of. 



FLORIDA'S RECLAIMED LANDS. lyy 

The planters of the South were too comfortable 
and contented in their condition, and too uncom- 
fortable and discontented with the aggressive in- 
dustry and enterprise of the North, to seek these 
lands before the war; and since the war the re- 
sources of the South, even with the freshly-infused 
energy among the people, have not been equal to 
the task of repairing the ravages of war, and, of 
course, could not consider an undertaking that re- 
quired vast outlay of money and patient waiting 
for results. It was not until 1881 that the At- 
lantic and Gulf Coast Canal and Okeechobee Land 
Company was granted a special charter by the 
Florida Legislature, with an authorized capital of 
ten millions, and obtained a concession from the 
State, of undisputed lawful authority, for the rec- 
lamation of all lands lying south of Township 
Twenty-four and east of Peace Creek, embracing 
over eight millions of acres. By the concession 
made to the Disston corporation every alternate 
section reclaimed becomes the property of the 
company in fee simple without lien of any kind. 
The direction of the corporation is exclusively 
Philadelphian, with the exception of Samuel H. 
Gray, of Camden, and F. A. Hendry, of Florida. 



1/8 



THE SOUTH. 



The Philadelphians are Hamilton Disston, Charles 
H. Gross, William H. Wright, T. Henry Asbury, 
Lewis W. Klohr, John L. Hill, A. C. Haynes, 
James M. Kreamer, and Robert W. Gibson. They 
accepted a work of colossal proportions, but Mr. 
Disston, who is the chief capitalist and manager 
of the enterprise, wisely calculated the certain out- 
come, and he has already passed the point of 
doubt and can clearly see the rapidly-approaching 
consummation that must bring more than ample 
reward. When it is remembered that the work 
had to be begun in an unsettled portion of the 
State; that boats and machinery had to be con- 
structed and operated for several years with no 
population but the operators of the company, and 
that various experiments had to be made under 
the severest trials before the proper methods could 
be mastered, the green verdure, fragrant blossoms, 
and bustling little city of Kissimmee, that has risen 
from the waters of the overflowing lake, must be 
a grateful spectacle to the men who made the 
gigantic venture ; but there is more substantial 
satisfaction for them in the fact that they have 
been entirely successful in their theory and opera- 
tions, and have already transferred to them in fee 



FLORIDA'S RECLAIMED LANDS. j^g 

one million one hundred and fifty-five thousand 
four hundred and thirty-two acres of land, being 
one-half of the amount actually reclaimed thus far 
by their efforts. 

After five years of often embarrassing operations 
by the Disston company, what was the generally 
accepted theory as to the intrinsic and early market 
value of the reclaimed lands has been conclusively 
demonstrated by the perfect reclamation and the 
luxuriant growth of valuable crops. These lake- 
border soils which are now, for the first time, ac- 
cessible to cultivation, " are composed of humus, 
with a small percentage of sand and disintegrated 
marine deposits, underlaid by a stratum of shell 
marl, — the whole resting upon a coralline or lime- 
stone formation," as is stated in the description 
given of them in brief by Engineer Kreamer, and 
whether cultivated or not they employ their wealth 
of productive power in the most luxuriant growth. 
I spent a day on the head lake and the canal 
connecting it with its sister lake below, and in- 
specting the cultivated fields which two years ago 
were sporting-places for the magnificent fish which 
abound in these ever fresh waters. The tree that 
shades the farm-house on the inland side, at the 



l8o THE SOUTH. 

foot of the first lake, was until lately the object 
to which the steamboat that bore me over the 
broad lake was moored when carrying men and 
materials to that point for the work ; and the five- 
hundred-acre farm of reclaimed land on which 
Colonel Rose, assistant superintendent of the com- 
pany, has his home, with its strawberries, which 
I gathered in spite of the general destruction by 
the severe winter, and its acres of blossoming vege- 
tables and cabbages, soon to be marketed, attest 
not only the complete success of the drainage en- 
terprise, but also the exceptional value of the soil 
rescued for the husbandman. His farm, just wrested 
from the bottom of the lake and with cultivation 
and improvement only commenced, would sell for 
more per acre to-day than half the best farms of 
Chester County, for the simple reason that one 
man and a mule can grow more from an acre 
every four months than four men and as many 
mules and acres could grow in Pennsylvania in a 
year. At the foot of the lake, where cultivation 
has had only one full season to demonstrate the 
fertility of the soil, I saw one cabbage-field, just 
about ready to be cut, whose product will return 
to the owner over twenty thousand dollars, and 



FLORIDA'S RECLAIMED LANDS. jgi 

then his land will be ready for another crop of 
whatever will pay best in season, without the pos- 
sibility of needed fertilizers for many years. Besides 
it, where the steamboat sailed without obstruction 
only two years ago, I saw the product of the 
sugar-field from which was gathered the best cane 
exhibited at the New Orleans Exposition ; and 
while the plant must be renewed every two years 
in the best lands of Louisiana, the near approach 
to the climate and soil of Cuba assures successive 
crops from year to year for probably a decade 
without replanting. I never appreciated until I saw 
this soil and its product, the truth and force of 
General Grant's letter on Florida, published in the 
Public Ledger several years ago, in which he said 
that the State " is capable of supplying all the 
oranges, lemons, pineapples, and other semi-tropical 
fruits used in the United States, and one hundred 
million dollars of sugar now imported." In the 
same letter he tersely and correctly summarized 
the resources of the State by saying that " it has 
an area greater than New York, Massachusetts, 
and Connecticut combined, with deposits of fer- 
tilizer under it and above it sufficient for many 

generations.; it only wants people and enterprise, 

1 6* 



J 82 THE SOUTH. 

both of which it is rapidly obtaining, and it affords 
the best opening in the world for young men of 
small means and great industry." That this re- 
claimed section will become the great sugar centre 
of the Union in a very few years is in no sense 
doubtful ; and when it is considered that much 
less valuable sugar lands in Louisiana, because in 
a much less friendly climate for the tender prod- 
uct, are worth from one to two hundred dollars 
per acre, the prospective value of these Florida 
lands may be measurably appreciated. They are 
undoubtedly the best sugar lands of the world out- 
side of Cuba, and the whole sugar belt of Florida 
will have a great water highway to the Gulf as 
a central artery of trade. By another year there 
will be regular lines of boats from Kissimmee to 
Charlotte Harbor, and thus this whole rich country 
will offer every inducement of climate, soil, variety 
of product, easy cultivation, and cheap transporta- 
tion, through the only really tropical water channels 
of the Union. 

The reclaimed land of the Southern lake region 
of Florida is not all sugar land. It presents every 
variety of soil and growth common to the climate. 
Back of the waters and rich bottom-lands what 



FLORIDA'S RECLAIMED LANDS. 183 

are called the hammocks are abundant; the higher 
lands which are timbered with hard or soft woods 
according to the quality of soil. The live-oak, 
hickory, birch, sweet bay, palmetto, mangrove, and 
mastic are common ; large bodies of cypress are 
within range of the new transportation just opened, 
and the pine lands are adapted to the orange grove. 
The chief advantage of this section of Florida is 
in the almost tropical climate, that exempts the 
fruit and vegetable crops from frosts when about 
Jacksonville and even farther south there is wide- 
spread destruction. From three to four crops can 
be grown each year, and there is no need of more 
than a single mule to plough to a proper depth, as 
there is no sod and no baking of the earth. Cot- 
ton, corn, sugar, tobacco, rice, potatoes, and very 
nutritious grasses for stock can be grown in the 
reclaimed lands, and the upland or hammock lands 
are the best of the continent for the orange grove 
excepting the Indian River country that is just 
east of the lake region on the Atlantic coast. The 
orange will bear several years earlier there than 
on the St. John's because of the more genial cli- 
mate, and other crops are hastened in proportion. 
Strawberries can be gathered the same year they 



1 84 



THE SOUTH. 



are planted ; figs bear in two years from cuttings ; 

i grapes bear the second year, peaches the second 
or third year, and oranges in four years from the 
bud. In ten years from this time the reclaimed 
lake lands will present the richest and most pro- 
ductive and prosperous settlement of Florida unless 
all present experience and indications are at fault; 
and if its opportunities were properly understood 
by the large class of small farmers of the North 
who labor hard and unceasingly to gain only 
scant food and raiment with little enjoyment, there 
would be a sudden influx of new settlers. Why 
our young men who seek to gain farms in the 
West by patient industry and severe economy 
should risk the uncertainties of crops and be con- 
tent with the slow advancement they can make 
there at best, when they can have cheaper lands, 
more easily cultivated lands, more accessible lands, 
greatly more productive lands, vastly more certainty 
in crops, with perpetual summer and less extreme 
of heat than there is in Iowa or Kansas, can be 
explained only by the want of general knowledge 
of the opportunities offered in Florida. I believe, 

' as General Grant expressed it, that '' Florida to- 
day affords the best opening in the world for young 



FLORIDA'S RECLAIMED LANDS. 185 

men of small means and great industry." Any- 
intelligent man who comes and sees for himself 
will reach the same conclusion, and the most in- 
viting part of Florida for men who come to make 
their homes here and get the best results of their 
own industry, is the large section now partially 
and soon to be completely reclaimed in the Southern 
lake region. 



HINTS TO FLORIDA SETTLERS. 



A SINGLE week is a short time in which to look 
over a State with as many imperfectly understood 
features as there are in Florida. I don't pretend 
to have done anything approaching justice to the 
subject; but I have traversed the St. John's from 
Jacksonville to Sanford, a distance of nearly two hun- 
dred miles; have travelled between the same points 
by rail; have journeyed southward by rail from San- 
ford fifty miles to Kissimmee, and spent a day on the 
lakes and reclaimed lands which skirt them; have 
seen the Atlantic coast at venerable St. Augustine 
and the northern part of the State from Jacksonville 
through Tallahassee to Pensacola, and have noted and 
studied with care the features of climate and product 
which chiefly interest the surplus capital and industry 
of the North. With the exception of one day given to 
a journey in the northern part of the State from the 

eastern sea to the western gulf, that is simply the 
i86 



HINTS TO FLORIDA SETTLERS. jg; 

southern fringe of Georgia, I have devoted my time 
to observation and inquiry in regard to the newer 
and more southern region that is now, and must 
long continue to be, the central attraction for 
Northern investors and settlers. The early settlers 
from the North naturally located on the romantic 
banks of the St. John's, as there was no transpor- 
tation southward except that furnished by the great 
river that is a law unto itself in flowing its waters 
toward the North Star. On its green shores are 
beautiful winter homes, with orange groves, early 
vegetation, a profusion of heartsome shrubbery and 
fragrant flowers; but the winter frosts are expected 
annually with more or less severity, and the growth 
of oranges and early vegetables is an incident rather 
than a purpose. The banks of the great river and 
its succession of fresh lakes are spangled with towns 
which are supported mainly by winter sojourners, 
and settlers have logically followed the embryo cities. 
The largest and best cultivated orange groves of the 
State are close to the St. John's, — one hundred miles 
or more south of Jacksonville, and they are sources 
of immense profit even with the peril of frequent 
frosts. Had the country for nearly two hundred 
miles farther south, from Sanford, the chief southern 



1 88 THE SOUTH. 

point of business on the river, to Lake Okeechobee, 
been opened by rail and boat ten years ago as it is 
now, the great orange groves would be there and 
practically safe from the ravages of winter, as they 
are on the Indian River. It is to this new part of 
Florida just opened to settlement by the railroad 
from Sanford, southwest to the Gulf at Tampa and 
also to Charlotte Harbor, and by water through the 
Disston drainage system, traversing the interior 
lands to the mouth of the Caloosahatchee, that the 
attention of investors and settlers must now be 
directed. By these improvements millions of acres 
of the best lands in the best climate of the State have 
been made inviting to settlers, as they present all the 
advantages of the earlier settled northern section, 
with more productive soil and as nearly a tropical 
climate as can be found in any part of the continent 
that is inhabitable. I have observed this section 
hastily and studied it imperfectly of course, but suf- 
ficiently to reach correct general conclusions, and I 
will close my observations and suggestions by a few 
practical hints to those who contemplate investing or 
settling in Florida. 

While there are other portions of the State which 
offer great inducements to both capital and labor, the 



HINTS TO FLORIDA SETTLERS. 



189 



tide of both money and population will certainly go 
south of Sanford for years to come, and I believe 
that the more fortunate will be fifty miles or more 
south of Kissimmee. The rapid growth of thriving 
towns and beautiful farms along the line of the rail- 
way from Sanford to Kissimmee, and the rapid 
increase of the value of lands, prove not only how 
Northern settlers get as far south as possible within 
range of transportation, but how rapidly and sub- 
stantially population and wealth multiply. Now the 
railway is open for the first time from Sanford clear 
through to Tampa, striking the Gulf south of the 
28th degree, and only opened in March to Charlotte 
Harbor south of the 27th degree. These railways 
drain the products of the Gulf side of Southern 
Florida, and the water highway just about to be 
opened through the Disston system of connecting 
canals and lakes will drain the products of the Ocean 
side, and both traverse the centre of their respective 
sections. This region would have been preferred by 
early settlers even if the present severest winter for 
half a century had not given an admonition on the 
subject that none can fail to heed ; but with the 
whole orange crop remaining on the trees and the 

entire crop of early vegetables destroyed by the 

17 



IQO 



THE SOUTH. 



freeze of last January, all doubts will be resolved in 
favor of the lands farthest south which are productive 
and accessible to rail or water highways. This 
region has been so lately open to investment and 
settlement that it is virgin soil for both, and is much 
cheaper than any other lands of equal fertility and 
advantages to be found in the State. I don't hesitate 
to advise, therefore, that present investments in 
Florida for either actual settlers or for speculative 
profit, as a rule, should be made in the newly-opened 
southern section of the State. Both settlers and spec- 
ulators can easily make mistakes there as elsewhere 
in a new country, but I believe that there is the very 
minimum of risk in the belt of the peninsula extend- 
ing from midway between the 29th and 28th degrees 
to the 27th. This takes in the Indian River and the 
reclaimed lands of the interior lakes, and there will 
be the centre of productive wealth in the Land of 
Flowers. 

Speculators need no advice about the purchase 
of lands, nor is it a matter of special public interest 
whether they are successful or unsuccessful in their 
ventures ; but actual settlers need to be well and 
practically advised, and their success or failure is 
a matter of vital interest to both the community 



HINTS TO FLORIDA SETTLERS. jqi 

and the State. There may be many speculative 
operations in Florida which will be fruitful mainly 
in disappointment, and there will be many actual 
settlers who, from some of the many obstacles 
which ever confront immigrants in new homes, will 
fail in Florida ; but, as a rule, it will be the fault 
of the settler, and not the fault of the climate, soil, 
or possibilities of the country. One of the common 
mistakes of agricultural immigrants is the belief 
that they must have as large a farm here as, they 
would need in Pennsylvania, where they must de- 
vote half of their land and labor to keeping them- 
seh/es and their stock during the unproductive 
more than half the year. A farm of twenty acres j 
properly located in Florida is equal to a farm of^ 
sixy acres in the North in producing capacity, and 
no part of the farm or labor is necessary to sustain 
either family or stock in unproductive seasons, as 
there are no non-producing periods from January 
until January. The settler who is to depend upon 
his own industry and economy to acquire a home 
must have eighty or more acres anywhere in the 
West, but twenty acres of fertile soil in the newly- 
opened Florida region can be bought for less money 
per acre than any land of equal fertility, transporta- 



192 



THE SOUTH. 



tion, and cheapness of improvement west of the 
Father of Waters, and in three or four months' time, 
and steadily thereafter, he can feed himself and all 
he possesses from his own soil with comparatively- 
little labor, excepting only his wheat bread and 
groceries. Forty acres are more than any farmer 
who expects to do the chief part of his own work 
can farm with profit in Florida, and the man who 
farms half the amount well will do better than his 
neighbor who attempts to farm more. When it is 
considered that one acre of first-class vegetable soil 
in a nearly tropical climate will generally produce 
more than the best twenty-acre field of wheat in 
Pennsylvania, and that some profitable crop can be 
repeated in the ground at least three times a year, 
the importance of small farms and good farming 
may be appreciated. Even the grasses on which 
stock can be as well fed as on our clover- and 
timothy-fields of Pennsylvania, need only a few 
weeks to make sweet and nutritious pastures, and 
the little hay required to keep stock in the best 
condition is hardly to be taken into the account 
of the general labor of the farm. Stock is badly 
cared for in most parts of the State only because 
it can come so nearly maintaining itself that the 



HINTS TO FLORIDA SETTLERS. jg^ 

regulation Southern farmer allows it to take its 
chances for the whole season, much to his own 
loss. What I wish to impress upon young men 
who want to work themselves into the ownership 
of a home and a farm that will afford them a good 
living with reasonably-assured profits is, that while 
they must have sixty or eighty acres in the West to 
do so, they will be as well provided with land, for 
practical results, with twenty acres in the southern 
portion of Florida; and land of the best producing 
qualities is now cheaper per acre in that region 
than is land of like qualities and advantages of 
market in any desirable portion of the West. A 
small farmer would do well to buy forty acres in 
Florida to multiply the future profits of his labors, 
but if he farms ten of it well the first year and 
twenty of it' in five years, he will accomplish a 
great work and have a small fortune in his un- 
touched lands. 

Many Northern settlers will be slow to learn that 
it is a great transformation from the rigorous climate 
of the North to the almost tropical climate of South- 
ern Florida, and those who refuse to understand the 
common-sense laws which require reasonable adap- 
tation of habit and diet to climate will suffer thereby. 



194 



THE SOUTH. 



There is nothing to apprehend from the popular 
bugbear of malaria in Florida, if any measure of 
care is exercised in selecting a location. It will be 
more difficult to make such a mistake in Florida 
than it would be in Pennsylvania or Kansas, but it 
can be made. The chief peril to the health of 
Northern settlers in Florida is in their own neglect 
of the plain laws of nature which the commonest 
comprehension should understand and obey. The 
savage of the Arctic region lives and thrives on 
blubber, and even the Arctic navigator can relish a 
dish of oil that would be applied only to his coarse 
boots or harness at home; but neither savage nor 
navigator would live a month in Florida on such diet, 
any more than they would live if clad for an Arctic 
winter in a semi-tropical climate. The Northern 
settler transferred into a Florida climate must accept 
the lighter, cheaper, and in every way better diet that 
nature offers him. Fruits and vegetables, so abun- 
dant around him, must largely take the place of his 
strong meats, greasy cakes, and generally heavy 
dishes which make the system feverish with needless 
heat even in the North, or his liver will become slug- 
gish, bilious disorders will be bred, and general ill 
health imputed to the climate, when it is solely the 



HINTS TO FLORIDA SETTLERS. jq^ 

fault of the sufferer himself While the extreme of 
heat in Florida, even in what is the nearest ap- 
proach to a tropical climate that can be settled, is 
not as great as that of Philadelphia, the almost per- 
petual summer requires for both immigrants and 
natives lighter food and more care to avoid exhaust- 
ive exertion ; but there is no reason why residents 
should become enervated. There is vastly more suf- 
fering from Northern diet in Florida than from mala- 
ria; and when it is considered that Florida only 
imperiously exacts the diet that common sense 
suggests in the North, there should be willing obe- 
dience to the laws of health in this region. 

The cost of purchasing and outfitting a farm in the 
section of Florida to which the bulk of immigration 
will turn its steps is much less than in any part of 
the West that is at all inviting to settlers. While 
lands in the thickly-populated and well-improved 
parts of the State along the lines of transportation 
are as dear as they are in Chester County, the more 
fertile and more certainly productive lands now just 
opened farther south can be purchased in good loca- 
tions for ten dollars per acre, and they are about as 
cheaply prepared for cultivation as the heavy-sodded 
prairie-lands of the West, which require a year of 



196 



THE SOUTH. 



taming before they produce at all. When once 
brought under cultivation one mule is abundant for 
the best of ploughing, and no heavy teams are neces- 
sary for hauling. Buildings are erected much cheaper 
than in Pennsylvania, as lumber is abundant, being 
one of the chief products of the State. An outlay of 
twenty-five hundred dollars would buy a forty-acre 
farm, build a comfortable house, procure stock and 
implements, and put one-fourth the farm in first-class 
cultivation, with an orange grove in the ground. No 
barns are needed, as hay is stacked and stock re- 
quire little protection at any season of the year. 
Half that amount can be had on credit on the land 
and improvements, but at double the rate of interest 
that like good security would command in the North. 
This estimate is for what would be a large farm for 
one who expects to cultivate it himself, and for what 
would be regarded as good improvements ; but those 
whose necessities will accept the pinching self-denial 
of a majority of Western immigrants can start small 
farms on little capital except industry and economy, 
and they can live comfortably all the year on their 
own products after the first four months. In short, 
the small farmer, or the young man who seeks to 
earn a home and farm for himself, has every advan- 



HINTS TO FLORIDA SETTLERS. iq^ 

tage of climate, cheapness and fertility of soil, early 
and bountiful product, and easy market facilities in 
Southern Florida, and it is undoubtedly the most 
inviting part of the Union now open to young men 
whose fortune is in their stout hearts and willing 
hands. 



THE SUGAR INDUSTRY. 



The sugar-planting interest is limited to four 
States, of which Louisiana is the chief, with Mis- 
sissippi and Texas furnishing small belts now de- 
voted to that industry, and the new and most 
promising Florida sugar belt just about to be opened 
to cultivation. In Louisiana it is the main product, 
and has more capital invested in it, outside of the 
sugar lands, than is invested in all the cotton 
States for the cultivation and marketing of cotton, 
exclusive of the soil. The cotton plantation can 
be stocked at a comparatively small outlay, in- 
cluding the cotton-gin, but to stock a good sugar 
plantation requires an investment of not less than 
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in machin- 
ery and appliances for the growth and marketing 
of the crop. With an outlay on each first-class 
sugar plantation equal to a first-class anthracite 

furnace in Pennsylvania, a failure of the crop or 
198 



THE SUGAR INDUSTRY. ig^ 

a severe depression in the market must greatly 
paralyze the business of Louisiana. With the 
sugar-planters prosperous, Louisiana is prosper- 
ous; with the sugar-planters unfortunate from any 
cause, there is general stagnation and embarrass- 
ment throughout the State. The commerce of New 
Orleans does not depend upon the single product 
of sugar, as the commerce of Mobile, Savannah, 
and Charleston depends upon cotton ; but while 
the Crescent City draws largely upon the cotton 
of the Southern States, reached by the Mississippi, 
and upon the products of Northern and Western 
States, drained by the Father of Waters and its 
tributaries, sugar is the chief source of productive 
wealth in Louisiana, and the mere commerce of 
a port cannot revive the general depression caused 
by unsuccessful sugar-planting. No centre of com- 
merce or trade can prosper in a State when there 
is a general absence of prosperity among the great 
producing interests. This is very clearly illustrated 
in Louisiana at this time. The sugar-planting in- 
terests are prostrated to a degree not experienced 
at any time since the war, and there is little pros- 
pect of an immediate revival of the industry that 
is so important to this State. Few sugar-planters 



200 



THE SOUTH. 



have paid actual expenses, even with severely eco- 
nomical management, for the last year; a large 
majority have lost money, and I hear of none 
who have profit after expenses and taxes, not 
counting interest on the heavy capital required. 

The problem of continuing or annihilating the 
sugar industry of the South, is one that presents 
peculiarly embarrassing features for our statesman- 
ship. We are now paying some fifty millions annu- 
ally in tariff duties to protect little more than 
one-tenth that amount of product; and as sugar 
enters into the daily consumption of all classes, 
rich and poor, the continuance of a protective policy 
is naturally antagonized, even outside of free-trade 
theorists, by considerations of interest. After all 
our theories about protection and free-trade, we all 
want to get the most we can for our own prod- 
ucts, and want to buy the products of others as 
cheaply as possible. The question of interest is, 
therefore, the underlying principle that impels differ- 
ent sections with different industries to help or hinder 
conflicting theories of statesmanship. The Pennsyl- 
vanian wants protection for iron and for coal and 
for the products of factories; the cotton-planter 
of the South, who buys everything he consumes 



THE SUGAR INDUSTRY. 



201 



and sells his whole harvest without importing com- 
petition, wants free-trade ; and the sugar- and rice- 
planters who skirt the cotton-fields toward the 
coast want protection, and they must have it or 
abandon the utterly unequal contest with foreign 
producers. Large as the protection now is for sugar, 
it is inadequate to the maintenance of the sugar 
industry. Under the special fostering care of their 
governments, the sugar-producers of Germany, 
France, and Spain can now undersell our domestic 
sugar, with nearly two cents a pound of duty in 
our favor ; and with the perfection of science applied 
to the product in foreign governments, and the 
largest percentage of sugar obtained from the raw 
material because of government guarantee, there is 
little prospect of anything like equality of advan- 
tages between the domestic and foreign sugar-pro- 
ducers. Like the advancement in the production 
of steel, by which the product has been cheapened 
more than fifty per cent, within a few years, 
the advancement in the production of sugar, by 
the refinement of mechanism, has cheapened the 
product nearly fifty per cent, abroad. Germany 
has advanced from the production of three per 
cent, of sugar from the beet to thirteen per cent. ; 



202 



THE SOUTH. 



France has advanced in almost equal proportion, 
and Cuba has kept pace with her competing sugar- 
fields to multiply and cheapen the product. This 
has been done in Germany and France by lavish 
subsidies to sugar-producers, in shape of drawbacks 
on importations. Sugar is more costly to the con- 
sumers of Germany and France than it is to the 
consumers of the United States, as the home con- 
sumption is heavily taxed ; but liberal drawbacks 
of taxes on all importations of sugar, and the fixed 
and permanent guarantee of the government to the 
sugar-producer, warrants the employment of the 
most improved machinery to reach the largest per- 
centage of product. The Louisiana sugar-planters 
have increased the product by recent improvements 
in machinery from five to seven and eight per cent., 
but they could increase it to ten or twelve per 
cent, by improvements already tested, and they must 
do it or give up the battle. To compete with the 
protected sugar-growers of foreign countries our 
home sugar-planters must practically throw out 
their present machinery as old iron, although cost- 
ing from one hundred thousand to one hundred 
and fifty thousand dollars on each large plan- 
tation, and supplant it with the equally costly but 



THE SUGAR INDUSTRY. 203 

perfected machinery lately applied to the sugar 
industry. They would do so if they had the guar- 
antee of permanent protection from the government 
that is given abroad, — that is, the protection that 
would enable them to meet the foreign producers 
on equal terms as to profit. They have not that 
protection now ; they have no assurance that the 
present protection will be continued, and they can 
venture on no new experiments as costly as all 
improvements in sugar production are with an un- 
certain Tariff policy. These facts explain why the 
sugar-planters of the South are suffering the severest 
paralysis in their industry, and why they cannot 
make nev/ outlay to improve their product. 

The country must now look the fact squarely in 
the face, that we must largely and permanently pro- 
tect the sugar industry or let it be entirely effaced 
from the list of American products. If the industry 
is to be fostered, it must have either increased pro- 
tection by Tariff duties, or it must have a certain 
subsidy for a definite period long enough to de- 
velop it in the appliances necessary to the largest 
percentage of product. To remove the Tariff on 
sugar would at once blot out our surplus revenue, 
and to offer a subsidy sufficient to develop the 



204 ^^^ SOUTH. 

industry to a self-sustaining point would require a 
present annual draft upon the revenue of ten mil- 
lions, to be increased each year for the period of 
ten years, — the shortest period named as sufficient 
to enable our sugar-producers to compete with the 
world. The theory of the most intelligent sugar- 
planters I have met is that the guarantee of four 
cents a pound upon sugar for ten years, either by 
Tariff duty or by government subsidy, would enable 
them thereafter to undersell the world, and establish 
one of the most important and prosperous and self- 
supporting industries of the continent. I doubt not 
that less protection than they name would as fully 
accomplish the purpose ; but I give the theory of 
those best informed and most interested, and I 
look upon it with interest and favor because any 
industry that can be made self-sustaining and seek 
the markets of the world, by a season of protec- 
tion, cheapens products for future consumers and 
adds to the common wealth of the whole country. 
I do not assume to decide how the problem of 
saving the sugar industry of the South is to be 
solved ; but I am clear that it should be saved ; 
and if it is to be saved from utter annihilation, it 
is cheapest and best for all, for producer and con- 



THE SUGAR INDUSTRY. 



205 



sumer alike, that it be so saved as to quicken it 
to the earliest and highest perfection in cheapness 
and percentage of product. It is an industry that 
cannot long languish, for in languishing it must die, 
because of the exceptional cost of the plant; and 
the country must decide at an early day whether 
we shall pay for a season to assure the cheap pro- 
duction of our own sugar, for which we have ample 
fields, or pay from one hundred and fifty million to 
two hundred million dollars annually to the sugar- 
growers of foreign lands. If a subsidy of five hun- 
dred millions would give England an abundant and 
cheaper supply of cotton, India would command it 
without a voice of protest. While ostensibly a free- 
trade government because of interest, no nation of 
the world more lavishly protects the industries es- 
sential to her internal revenue and general prosperity 
than does England. 



18* 



THE NEGRO AS A RULER. 



The problem of negro self-rule has not been 
solved, as the true solution must be the work of 
years of opportunity for growth in fitness for it, but 
it has been fairly tried in two portions of the Union 
since the war, and in both instances it has resulted in 
debauched leaders and demoralized followers, leaving 
the general condition of the race worse because of 
the experiment. To assume that the black man, who 
has been a slave in the South and a menial in the 
North, and whose education was either positively 
interdicted or neglected, should prove himself pro- 
ficient in self-rule, without aid or even sympathy from 
the mass of the whites, is to judge him by a standard 
that would overthrow every principle of popular 
government ; but a country that is struggling to 
solve the problem of universal suffrage, with great 
States subject to the numerical majority of ignorant 

and thriftless masses, must carefully study every 
206 



THE NEGRO AS A RULER. 20/ 

recurring phase of the effort. In Washington City, 
where the negro was first enfranchised, the nation 
exhibited to the world the most corrupt, profligate, 
and demoralized government to be found in the 
Union, and the same political power that gave the 
ballot to the black men of the capital, was compelled 
to revoke the elective franchise and save the credit 
and good name of Washington by making the negro 
voiceless in his own government. It was a sad 
necessity, — and a sad confession of the failure of 
suffrage when exercised by race prejudice without 
intelligence ; but the same Republican statesmen who 
gave the right of self-rule to the black man in the 
capital of the nation, had to rescue the capital from 
destruction and shame by sweeping disfranchisement. 
In no section of the Union did the colored race 
have such an opportunity to succeed in creditable 
self-rule as in South Carolina, and the failure has 
simply made it impossible for them to regain power 
in that State for many years to come. That the 
illiterate bondman of yesterday should rule a great 
State wisely to-day could not be expected ; but the 
masses have failed to be just to themselves and to 
the power they were suddenly called upon to exer- 
cise, mainly because of the corruption and faithless- 



2o8 ^-^^ SOUTH. 

ness of the leaders of the race. South Carolina had 
a galaxy of colored leaders when reconstruction 
committed the control of the State to the preponder- 
ating race, that has not been equalled in ability and 
culture in the race in any other portion of the 
country; and if they had been honest with their 
race and with power, the negro masses would have 
been elevated, instead of demoralizing them, and they 
would have been taught industry, self-reliance, and 
thrift instead of appealing to the passions, prejudices, 
and low cupidity of ignorance. When I recall the 
long list of able negroes who were prominent in the 
early Republican rule of South Carolina and follow 
them through their gradual descent into dependence 
or shame, it presents a pointed commentary upon 
the problem of self-rule by the negro. There are 
negro names connected with the control of South 
Carolina which should have made the State and the 
race illustrious in the elevation of the freedmen and 
in the just government of the Commonwealth. And 
many of them were natives of the State. Cardoza, 
Rainey, Smalls, and Nash were all born in slavery. 
Cardoza was made free by his father-master; Rainey 
purchased his own freedom before the war, and 
Smalls and Nash were made free by emancipation. 



THE NEGRO AS A RULER. 200 

These men, endowed with uncommon intelHgence and 
knowing the bondman's cruel Hfe, should have been 
each a Moses to lead his people into the promised 
land of self-rule ; but Cardoza and Smalls are con- 
victs, and Nash escaped the criminal dock by con- 
fession and resignation of his seat in the Senate. 
Rainey alone escaped a career of crime, and he 
ceased to be potential with his race. Of the other 
distinguished negro leaders I recall the untutored 
but eloquent Whipper, who came from Michigan; the 
shrewd and unscrupulous Purvis, who bore an hon- 
ored Philadelphia name ; the brilliant Elliott, who 
fitted himself in the free schools of Massachusetts to 
answer the Confederate Ex- Vice President Stephens 
in triumph on the floor of Congress ; the lawyer, 
Wright, who was the first negro admitted to the bar 
in Pennsylvania, and who rose to the Supreme Bench 
of South Carolina ; the cultured Delany, who won 
college honors in Ohio, and once made a bold stand 
for negro reform by running as the reform candidate 
for Lieutenant-Governor, and the sagacious Boseman, 
who served his race by nestling down as the Charles- 
ton postmaster. There were others of more or less 
ability, but the half-score I have named should have 
made South Carolina a most prosperous Common- 



2IO THE SOUTH. 

wealth and her numerical majority of freedmen a 
happy and wisely self-ruled people. 

The man who should have been the foremost of 
his race in honor and usefulness is Cardoza. He 
had everything to make him faithful and eminent. 
He possesses superior natural abilities, was thor- 
oughly educated in Scotland when nominally a 
slave, entered the ministry and was the respected 
pastor of a New England congregation when eman- 
cipation and reconstruction brought him back to 
aid his people in the escape from darkness. He 
came with the purest and loftiest aims, and was 
the first Secretary of State under the carpet-bag 
reign. He was purposely assigned to that position 
by the ruling white and black adventurers because 
he was honest, as his official duties gave him no 
power of restraint upon his thieving associates ; but 
the luxury of crime was around him on every side; 
he learned to tolerate it, and soon his good pur- 
poses were lost in the flood-tide of corruption that 
surged against him. He was deemed sufficiently 
demoralized to be made State Treasurer under the 
later and more violent reign of debauchery, and he 
ended a convict. He was saved from sentence by 
the general treaty of peace between the contending 



THE NEGRO AS A RULER. 211 

forces of the State that saved Patterson, Smalls, and 
Nash, with Cardoza, from the penitentiary; gave 
Butler his seat in the United States Senate, and 
ended various Federal prosecutions for violation of 
the national election laws. Cardoza became a clerk 
under the Hayes administration. Whipper was one 
of the earliest of the legislative jobbers, and suc- 
ceeded in foisting himself into a judicial election, 
but both sides revolted against such a mockery of 
justice, and he was compelled to surrender his claim 
to the office. He is now a local leader and petti- 
fogger among the semi-barbarous negro hordes of 
Beaufort. Purvis was a prominent leader in the 
House as chairman of a most important committee, 
and he did as much as any one to hasten the 
overthrow of negro rule. He resides in Charleston, 
and became a beneficiary of the national govern- 
ment. Elliott is one of the ablest and boldest of 
the race I have known. He gathered a fair edu- 
cation in the Massachusetts free schools, and de- 
veloped into one of the most brilliant and sagacious 
leaders of the State. He was Adjutant-General, 
Speaker of the House and Member of Congress, 
and his famous debate with Alexander H. Stephens 
in the national House of Representatives stamped 



212 



THE SOUTH. 



him as capable of high leadership among men. But 
he devoted his great abilities to the work of plunder 
instead of elevating and benefiting his race, and 
when the State was robbed until both whites and 
blacks were impoverished, the deluded negroes de- 
serted him, and he then basked in the sunshine of 
a department position in Washington. Wright had 
a rare opportunity to make a creditable record for 
himself, his race, and his adopted State. He had 
opened the way for the elevation of his colored 
brethren by gaining the first admission to the bar 
in Pennsylvania, and he was chosen one of the three 
Supreme Judges of South Carolina. He was not 
eminently fitted for the position, although he could 
have filled it creditably by the exercise of judicial 
integrity, but his decisions soon became a matter of 
open barter, and dissipation followed his disgrace, 
until he finally resigned to escape unanimous im- 
peachment. Smalls is of the heroic mould. He 
is remembered as the slave who ran his vessel into 
the Union blockade to cast his fortunes with the 
defenders of the government. He is illiterate, of 
course, but a man of rare natural abilities. He should 
have been a beacon-light for his race to guide them 
to advancement, industry, and honest thrift, but he 



THE NEGRO AS A RULER. 21 3 

ended his career in State politics as a convict and 
carried his dishonor into Congress. Nash was an 
ilHterate hotel servant in Columbia before the war, 
but he had much of the ability and more of the 
selfish cunning of Smalls, and he was an omnipotent 
local leader for a time, making himself Senator and 
Presidential elector in 1876. He held the fate of 
Hayes in his hands when the result in the State 
was questioned, and he made the most of it. He 
publicly professed to have received a large offer 
from the Democrats to vote for Tilden, but whites 
and blacks understood that it was simply notice 
that the Republicans must pay his price, and it had 
to be done. He confessed his guilt as a Senator 
and resigned to save prosecution, and he is now in 
obscure retirement with none so poor as to do him 
reverence. Boseman made a battle for himself and 
became comfortably fixed as postmaster in Charles- 
ton, and Delany was a trial justice by the favor 
of the Democratic Governor. Rainey purchased 
his own freedom, and has been active in the Repub- 
lican control of the State without becoming noted 
as a jobber. He was assailed as corrupt, but it 
was because he tolerated rather than participated in 
corruption, and the searching investigation that fol- 



214 ^^^ SOUTH. 

lowed the overthrow of the carpet-baggers failed 
to stamp him with guilt, but he has lost his power 
with his race because he is regarded as a place- 
man, and he gravitated to a Washington clerkship. 
Such is the sad story of the decline or fall of the 
ablest body of negro leaders ever felt in any of 
the States. 

None know better than the masses of the colored 
voters of South Carolina that their attempt at self- 
rule has been a terrible failure, and they are now 
distrustful of all colored leaders, while they have 
nothing but curses for the desperate white adven- 
turers who impoverished both races while assuming 
to elevate and benefit the negro. It was this feeling 
that made the election of Hampton possible in 1876, 
and the sceptre once wrested from such a race will 
not soon be regained. They feel little hope of aiding 
themselves by a negro restoration. They saw the 
State robbed of lands for negro homes, and the 
property stolen by those who claimed to be the friend 
of the negro. They saw taxes wrung from property 
to educate the negro, and a large portion stolen out- 
right, and the schools made merely a mockery of 
education. Now they see seventy-five thousand 
colored children in free-schools, and nearly twelve 



THE NEGRO AS A RULER. 



215 



hundred colored teachers instructing them under the 
beneficence of the State. They see, also, an amend- 
ment of the Constitution adopted making fixed and 
irrevocable appropriations for free and equal educa- 
tion, and the Governor of the State declaring for still 
greater increase in the facilities for instructing both 
whites and blacks. They see business and confi- 
dence revive ; they have more labor and better pay ; 
they are steadily increasing their friendly relations 
with the whites by leases of lands, and many of them 
are becoming small proprietors since they have 
ceased to neglect industry to follow the commands of 
selfish leaders, and a large proportion of the more 
thrifty class have openly taken their political stand 
with the whites, while thousands of others, espe- 
cially in minority counties, refuse to take any part in 
politics. They have a majority of from twenty to 
thirty thousand in the State on a strict color-line 
division, but there will never be another solid negro 
vote cast in this State. Superior intelligence and 
will must rule here as in all other places in the 
world, and both whites and blacks understand it. 
There will be unjustifiable methods to repress such 
negro counties as Beaufort and Charleston, and they 
will need the correcting hand of justice; but until all 



2i6 THE SOUTH, 

the laws of human nature and of interest shall be 
reversed, the white man will rule the inferior race, 
and he will do it better in the South at this time 
than the negro can rule himself This is not the 
sentimental view of the race issue in the South, but 
it is the truth. 



THE RACE PROBLEM. 



The first serious phase of the race problem in the 
South has been solved; but its solution is likely to 
present another and a graver problem, involving the 
two races of the South. After years of fretful strife, 
made mainly by adventurers who appealed to the 
ignorance, prejudice, and cupidity of the blacks, the 
whites rule the entire South, with the active co- 
operation of a considerable number of the more in- 
telligent and thrifty blacks, and with the entirely 
passive assent of the others. Here, as elsewhere in 
the Union, and as elsewhere in every civilization of 
the world, intelligence, integrity, and property, when 
combined, will inevitably rule in the end; and the 
battle of the blacks for political mastery, even if 
honestly and wisely led, could have attained only 
fitful triumphs. As it was most corruptly and un- 
scrupulously led, without fidelity to either whites or 

blacks, and without respect for the interests of party 

19^ 217 



2i8 THE SOUTH. 

or race, defeat came speedily in disregard of all the 
power and appliances of the national government, 
and when it came it left only monuments of shame 
for friend and foe. The profligacy and theft of negro 
rule in the South alienated the few of the race who 
saw that freedom did not furnish corn and bacon, 
and that blacks, like whites, must earn their own 
bread by the sweat of the brow; and others soon 
learned that the bewildering promises of adventurers 
who organized and voted the blacks were made to 
the ear only to be broken to the hope. The result 
has logically been that as negroes became indus- 
trious and thrifty and the owners of property, they 
have either voted with the whites to assure the safety 
of both person and property, or they have retired 
from all participation in politics. There is nothing 
novel in this feature of the race question in the 
South. The blacks of the South are employed and 
fed almost wholly by the property-owners, and they 
have everything to lose by political antagonism. In 
the North, and in no Northern State more than in 
Pennsylvania, tens of thousands of intelligent whites 
vote with their employers for the same reasons, and 
many of them would suffer the same fate as the 
blacks of the South if they voted against the capital 



THE RACE PROBLEM. 210 

that gives them labor. The same immutable law that 
governs the political relations between employers 
and employed in the North governs in the South, 
only it governs a much larger measure of intelli- 
gence and pride of manhood in Pennsylvania than in 
Alabama. If intelligent citizens of any Northern 
State will look about them among their own people 
in a political campaign, they will see the clear expla- 
nation of what is called the failure of the black vote 
of the South. It is the question of corn and bacon 
in the South ; it is the question of bread and raiment 
in the North, and that tells the whole story. 

The political revolution that retired the Repub- 
lican party from power, after a reign of nearly a 
quarter of a century, will end all effort at political 
organization on the race line. It has been practically 
a failure for years past, when there were many cir- 
cumstances to inspire the hope of partial success ; 
and now the whole race issue perishes by the change 
of national authority. To-day there is nothing left 
of the race organization in politics. There was a 
shudder among the blacks immediately after the elec- 
tion of Cleveland, because they feared the fulfilment 
of the predictions of their leaders that they would be 
remanded back to slavery ; but they already see that 



220 I^HE SOUTH, 

their leaders were deliberately untruthful, and all 
apprehensions of harshness to their race because of 
a change of political power have perished. Every 
possible appeal was made to their ignorance and 
prejudice before the late election, as has been usual 
in all election campaigns of the last fifteen years, to 
consolidate the colored vote as the only way to 
defeat a return to bondage; but now Democratic 
success has come ; the whites have in no degree 
changed their friendly relations toward the blacks, 
and there are few of the colored race so ignorant 
as not to understand that no change in political au- 
thority can limit their civil rights. The blacks are, 
therefore, satisfactorily assured on the one question 
that disturbed them, and that assurance has taught 
them more pointedly than ever before that their 
leaders are characterless, untruthful, and dangerous 
to the peace and prosperity of the colored race. 
And when it is considered that the active leaders 
of the colored voters in maintaining the race issue 
in politics have been the Federal officials in the 
South, the end of race organization must be clearly 
apparent to all. 

I have not seen an intelligent politician or busi- 
ness man in the South who does not look upon the 



THE RACE PROBLEM. 221 

now assured general division of the colored voters 
with grave apprehension. The race issue in politics, 
although largely broken in recent elections, coerced 
the practical unity of the whites. The conflicts of 
ambition were subordinated to the common peril of 
negro supremacy, and the whites were compelled 
to stand together to avert it. There was no field 
for free lancers in politics among the whites, and 
their jealousies and conflicting aims were suppressed 
by a supreme necessity to which all bowed without 
question. Now the issue of black unity and of 
black supremacy is an issue of the past. The col- 
ored voters will be indifferent to politics, as a rule, 
except when appeals to their ambition and cupid- 
ity recall them to active efforts. The field is thus 
opened to the long - smothered ambition of the 
whites who would gladly have rudely jostled each 
other in the race for promotion, and the blacks will 
be appealed to by disputing aspirants. These ap- 
peals will not be made to the intelligence or to the 
integrity of the blacks, as such appeals would be 
profitless. They will be made to their ignorance, 
to their prejudices, to their cupidity, to all their 
baser qualities, just as ambitious politicians do in 
the North, and there is grave danger of thus in- 



222 THE SOUTH. 

augurating a general sweep of political demoraliza- 
tion in both races. The Southern people possess 
just the same human nature that other people pos- 
sess. They are likely to be just as ambitious and 
as mean in promoting mean ambition as the average 
American politician in every section of the country ; 
and with an immense colored vote, nearly equalling 
the whites in many Southern States and superior 
in numbers in South Carolina and Mississippi, and 
in the lowest strata of ignorance, idleness, and su- 
perstition, what must be the harvest of the obliter- 
ation of the race line in Southern politics ? This is 
the most serious race problem the South has ever 
attempted to solve, and I share the apprehensions 
of the more intelligent Southern people that the 
last stage of the race issue will be vastly worse 
than any of the past. 

There is much unreasonable misconception in the 
North of the relative condition of the blacks in the 
North and in the South. The prejudice of caste is 
just equally strong in both sections of the country. 
The black man can no more sit at the table of the 
most blatant Republican in the North than he can 
sit at the table of his old master in the South. 
The same social laws govern all peoples, and they 



THE RACE PROBLEM. 



223 



are immutable. Politicians theorize differently in 
election campaigns, but there the theory ends. The 
prejudice of race is fivefold stronger in the North than 
in the South. The Northern people have no love 
for the black man, and even those who battled for 
his freedom and enfranchisement, as a rule, cherish 
vastly more profound prejudice of race than do the 
Southern people. While the North maintains its 
deep prejudice of race, the people of the South 
have a general and strong sympathy for the negro. 
Nearly all of them have played with the negro in 
childhood, have been nursed by the black " mamma," 
and have grown up with more or less affection for 
them. Classify it in what type of affection you 
may, it is none the less an affection that tempers 
the hard, unyielding prejudice of race that prevails 
in the North. This distinction between the North- 
ern and Southern people on the race question will 
prepare the public mind in the North for the dissipa- 
tion of another unfounded sectional prejudice that 
is deeply rooted there. The educational facilities for 
the blacks are better in the South to-day than they 
are in the North, in proportion to the facilities prof- 
fered to all. South Carolina employs and pays out 
of the State Treasury more black teachers than 



224 



THE SOUTH, 



are employed in all the States of the North, and 
Alabama employs eleven hundred colored male 
teachers and five hundred colored female teachers. 
And they provide the best means for fitting the 
colored people for teaching. The normal schools 
for whites and blacks in both Alabama and South 
Carolina are exactly equal, and the treasury of the 
State is largely drawn upon to qualify the colored 
race for teaching itself North Carolina, Georgia, 
Mississippi, and indeed most of the old slave States, 
each sustain more colleges for the blacks than do 
Pennsylvania or Massachusetts; and just as educa- 
tional facilities have increased for the whites, whether 
in common or normal schools or in colleges, they 
have been equally increased for the blacks so far as 
State appropriations have aided them. In Georgia 
the colored University ranks with the white Uni- 
versity, and even in Mississippi, presumably the 
most Bourbon of Southern States, the State does 
much more for the collegiate education of the black 
race than does Pennsylvania. I have heard South- 
ern men complain of many features of their local 
governments, but I have yet to hear the first one to 
complain of the equal education of the two races. 
And what is true in the matter of education is 



THE RACE PROBLEM. 225 

equally true of the recognition of the black race 
in Southern politics. I have seen colored Demo- 
cratic members in the South Carolina Legislature, 
nominated and elected mainly by white votes, and 
in New Orleans the black policeman, appointed by 
Democratic authority, is met on every street and 
has worn the insignia of police power for years be- 
fore a Democratic Mayor in Philadelphia first recog- 
nized the colored voter as entitled to wear the star 
and blue. In South Carolina alone there are more 
black Democrats in representative office than there 
are blacks of all parties in all the States of the 
North. Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, where the 
black voters hold the balance of power in both city 
and State, could not elect a colored man to the 
Legislature or to any other honorable or lucrative 
office in the strongest Republican district; but 
South Carolina Democrats elect him to office, with 
all the lingering prejudices of the relation of mas- 
ter and slave. The intelligent and dispassionate 
Northerner who closely observes the relations of the 
two races North and South, is forced to confess that 
with all our boasted superior devotion to the black 
race, and with all our assaults upon the South for the 
oppression of the blacks, the negro is better treated 



226 ^-^^ SOUTH. 

by the South than by the North. I regret to make 
such a confession; but it is the plain truth that we 
theorize about the elevation of the black race with 
little practice in accord with our teaching, while the 
South theorizes little on the subject and practises 
more than it teaches in the considerate care of the 
emancipated slaves. 

This is the plain truth in regard to race domina- 
tion in the South, as it is the plain truth of the race 
in the North. In the South every channel of in- 
dustry is open to him. The white and the black 
mechanic are on equal footing; the prejudices of race 
have no existence, save when there is a struggle for 
the domination of the spoiler over property, and he 
legislates and fills positions for which he is fitted, 
not only with the sympathy but often by the votes 
of the whites. I saw black men sitting on the Dem- 
ocratic side of Southern Legislatures, but no Re- 
publican district in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania 
has ventured to nominate one of the seventy-five 
hundred colored voters of the city, or one of the 
thrice that number in the State, for any legislative 
position, either State or National. I saw the colored 
man mingle with Democratic organizations in the 
South, but not one could sit in the councils of the 



THE RACE PROBLEM. 227 

League or the Union Club, or march in mixed ranks 
with the Invincibles or Young RepubHcans in Phila- 
delphia. I saw him have free access to every chan- 
nel of mechanical industry in the South, but he is 
relentlessly excluded from the organized mechanical 
pursuits of Republican Philadelphia. His admission 
into the printing-office of the Times or the Press or 
the North American would vacate every white man's 
case, where most of them vote the Republican ticket 
to help the black man; and the colored labor of the 
South, as a class, is to-day better paid, more steadily 
employed, and more uniformly free from want than 
the farm labor of the North or of any country of the 
world. Indeed, so great is the demand for labor in 
the now rapidly progressing South, that colored 
laborers are employed from January to January as 
a rule ; their wives and children double or quadruple 
their income in the cotton-picking season, that lasts 
three months in the year, and there is now a yearly 
winter influx of white labor from the North to aid in 
the sugar and rice harvests. This is the peace to the 
black and the white man that has followed the now 
accepted domination of the whites in the South, and 
the black man does not wish it changed for a re- 
newal of a struggle to which he is utterly unequal. 



228 ^^^ SOUTH. 

If the North must assume the task of elevating the 
black man to equal power regardless of fitness, let it 
begin by giving him in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 
New York, and other States the same industrial 
equality and political promotion that the less edu- 
cated blacks of the South now enjoy with the cordial 
sympathy of the Southern whites. I saw the same 
colored leader (ex-Senator Revels), who was ex- 
cluded from the forum of the Academy of Music 
when a Republican United States Senator, solely be- 
cause of his race, now at the head of a colored col- 
lege that is sustained entirely by the Democratic 
State government of Mississippi, and he holds his 
high commission from the same authority, while Re- 
publican Pennsylvania has no such temple of learning 
for the black man. Although forbidden to speak in 
the Philadelphia Academy, he can speak to intelli- 
gent and appreciative white audiences in the State 
that is blotted by the Kemper, the Yazoo, and the 
Carrollton tragedies. In all the reign of passion 
that has followed the war of races in the South, I 
can find no imitation of the exclusion of a Curtis 
from a public hall by the Republican Mayor of 
Philadelphia. These are unpleasant contrasts to 
present, but between the accusers of the North and 



THE RACE PROBLEM. 220 

the accused of the South there must one day be 
truth, and I shall not hinder its early coming. 

Nashville gives an impressive illustration of the 
progress of the higher education of the blacks in the 
South. The Fisk University is one of the conspicu- 
ous monuments which dot the many beautiful hills 
about the city, and the citizens of the capital regard 
it with pride and cordial sympathy. Among the 
officers who were stationed at Nashville after the 
close of the war was General Fisk, out of whose kind 
heart and thoughtful spirit this great work was pro- 
jected, and by whose energetic labors it was carried 
on. The funds raised were not sufficient to complete 
all that was necessary for the students, and a party 
of colored men and women, gifted with fine voices 
and musical genius, visited the different cities, and, 
indeed, crossed the Atlantic, for the purpose of earn- 
ing money to build Jubilee Hall, which building was 
necessary in connection with that already provided. 
The professors, with their families, and the students 
live in the large building, while the chapel, class- 
rooms, laboratories, etc., are in Jubilee Hall. There 
are more than three hundred students being bene- 
fited by the thoughtful kindness of those who thus 

labored in their behalf. The intelligent, earnest 

20* 



230 ^^^ SOUTH. 

countenances presented told how true is the saying, 
" Education makes the man, the want of it the fellow." 
The destiny of the future of their race is largely 
within their labors and the labors of the thousands 
of colored teachers in the field. The minutes were 
too few to enjoy fully the lesson of the Fisk Univer- 
sity, but the general and earnest interest manifested 
by the students and the beautiful parting song they 
gave told that advancement is no longer the exclusive 
attribute of the whites. 



JEFFERSON DAVIS. 



A JOURNEY through the South for the study of 
the currents of opinion and the present condition 
and probable progress of the reconstructed States, 
would be incomplete without a visit to the one 
man who must stand in history as the front of the 
overthrown Confederacy. A drive of five miles 
from Mississippi City through the sand and strag- 
gling pines which skirt the Gulf bay exhibits 
the same general dilapidation among the old-time 
summer homes, which were once the favorite re- 
treats of the elite of New Orleans in the sickly 
season. The shore of the bay has a number of 
palatial plantation-houses, but they have fallen into 
the sweeping decay that marks them as relics of an 
age that has gone. The only one that seems to have 
been carefully preserved from the desolation that 
surrounds it is the Dorsey place, now the home of 

Jefferson Davis. In a forest of green live-oaks, 

231 



232 ^^-^ SOUTH. 

richly-laden orange-trees, and a profusion of vines 
and flowers, a large frame plantation-house is pre- 
sented. It is a single story in height, and has the 
regulation pillars and broad verandas of the aristo- 
cratic Southern mansion. There the ex-Confederate 
President lives with his nephew, General Davis, and 
their joint families. The ex- Queen of the Confed- 
erate Court is a stout, handsome, cultured, and genial 
woman ; and a daughter, a strongly-marked copy of 
the mother, possesses unusual attractions of both 
person and intellect. The house is furnished with 
every regard for comfort, as the well-worn easy-chairs 
and lounges and the hall and parlor divans faithfully 
attest, and the walls are decorated with ancient paint- 
ings and modern bric-a-brac, while the wide chimney- 
place and capacious mantel tell how the cheerful pine 
fire sparkles when a chill or a stray frost silences the 
song of the mocking-bird and the bloodthirsty sere- 
nade of the mosquito. Soon after I had been politely 
bowed into the parlor, Jefferson Davis entered alone, 
and his greeting was the cordial welcome of the pro- 
verbial hospitality of the South. I confess to dis- 
appointment in the general appearance of the man 
who stands in history to-day as the soldier-statesman 
without a country. I expected to find the strongly- 



JEFFERSON DAVIS. 233 

marked traces of a grievously disappointed life, and 
severe civility and studied reticence in discussing all 
things of the past; but those who believe Jefferson 
Davis to be misanthropic in temperament and em- 
bittered against the nation and the world greatly 
misjudge him. Nor is he the broken invalid that 
he is generally regarded. 

His yet abundant locks and full beard are deeply 
silvered, and his face and frame are spare as they 
always have been ; but his step is steady, and the 
hard lines of his brow, which are so conspicuous in 
his pictures, are at once effaced when he enters into 
conversation. Instead of impressing the visitor as a 
political recluse who has no interest in the land to 
whose citizenship he will live and die a stranger, he 
at once invites the freedom of the planter's home by 
chatting without reserve, save when his contempo- 
raries are likely to be criticised, when he adroitly 
and pleasantly turns the discussion into inoffensive 
channels. He is yet the same positive man in all his 
convictions and purposes that made him the leader 
of a causeless rebellion. He well understands that 
he cast the die for empire or for failure that must 
make him alien to the country and the world, and 
that he lost; and he knows that he is to-day the 



234 ^^^ SOUTH. 

most powerless of all men in the land to retrieve the 
fortunes of those who followed him to bereavement 
and sacrifice. He reads aright the inexorable judg- 
ment that makes him execrated for the Confederacy, 
while his equally guilty subordinates have been wel- 
comed to the fatted calf His Vice-President, who 
followed the slave empire afar off when doubt and 
darkness gathered about it, made haste to scramble 
over the ruins of the Confederacy, and regain the seat 
in Washington from which he seceded with Davis to 
aid in guiding the rebellion. Two of his unnoted 
warriors have sat in Republican Cabinets ; Lee's 
ablest lieutenant was the Republican Minister to 
Turkey; the man who marched the first regiment of 
volunteers to Charleston, and who served as Confed- 
erate Senator until Appomattox became historic, died 
as the Republican Minister to Russia; and Senate, 
House, and the Washington departments swarmed 
with men under Republican rule who were abreast 
with Jefferson Davis in every effort to dismember the 
Republic; but Davis is the embodiment of humilia- 
tion, while his fellows go in and out without dis- 
pleasure. I heard no allusion to or complaint of this 
injustice, but it is plainly evident that Davis entirely 
appreciates it, and that he believes he would not be 



JEFFERSON DAVIS. 235 

consistent with himself and the grave responsibilities 
he assumed, however mistaken he may have been in 
assuming them, if he did not deliberately remain an 
alien to the government that he more conspicuously 
than all others struggled to overthrow. He could 
not help the South or himself by seeking or accept- 
ing restoration to citizenship, and he is wisely con- 
tent with stubborn faith in the rectitude of his lost 
cause. 

I have long desired to know the exact truth from 
the fountain of Southern knowledge on the subject 
in regard to several important events of the war, 
and I was agreeably surprised at the freedom with 
which Mr. Davis met my inquiries. Why Beaure- 
gard was ordered to fire upon Anderson in Fort 
Sumter, after his surrender was inevitable at a speci- 
fied time without assaulting the flag, has never been 
entirely understood. It was the act of madness, as 
it made division in the North impossible, and I have 
always believed that the real cause of the order to 
open fire was to unify the South and end the 
threatening movements for reunion on terms. Mr. 
Davis answered promptly and emphatically that the 
order was given solely because faith had been 
broken by the Lincoln administration in attempting 



236 THE SOUTH. 

to reinforce Anderson, and that the South needed 
no war to soHdify its people. I think he errs in 
underestimating the probable power of the move- 
ment in the South for concentration before the war, 
but it is evident that in deciding to issue the fatal 
order for the assault upon Sumter he believed the 
Confederacy invincible, and defiantly resented what 
he regarded as a violation of the pledge of the Fed- 
eral government. That act practically consolidated 
the North, and thenceforth the Confederacy was a 
fearfully hopeless venture. On another important 
point he answered with the same freedom. When 
asked whether the aggressive movement of Lee that 
culminated at Gettysburg was adopted as purely 
military strategy or the offspring of political neces- 
sity inside the Confederacy, he answered that it was 
the wisest of both military and political strategy, 
but that it was not dictated at all by political con- 
siderations. He said that the wisdom of the mili- 
tary movement was proven by the recall of Meade 
from Virginia and the transfer of both armies to 
Northern soil ; but, he soberly added, the battle was 
a misfortune. The chances were equal, as he re- 
garded it, for military success, and that would have 
deranged the whole plan of the government and 



JEFFERSON DA VIS. 237 

impaired its resources for the campaign of that year. 
As a mihtary movement, Mr. Davis says the Get- 
tysburg campaign had the entire approval of Lee, 
and there were no poHtical divisions in the South 
to dictate any departure from the wisest military 
laws. I desired, also, to know whether, at the time 
of the Hampton Roads conference between Lincoln, 
Seward, Stephens, and others, Mr. Davis had re- 
ceived any intimation from any creditable source 
that Mr. Lincoln would assent to the payment of 
four hundred millions as compensation for slaves, 
if the South would accept emancipation and return 
to the Union. He answered that he had no such 
intimation from any source, but that if such propo- 
sition had been made, he could not have entertained 
it as the Executive of the Confederacy. He said 
that he was the sworn Executive of a government 
founded on the rights of the States ; that slavery 
was distinctly declared to be exclusively a State in- 
stitution, and that such an issue could have been 
decided only by the independent assent of each 
State. Some of them, he added, would have ac- 
cepted such terms at that time, but others would 
have declined it, and peace was, therefore, impossi- 
ble on that basis. 



238 



THE SOUTH. 



Mr, Davis discussed the present attitude and fu- 
ture prospects of the South with manifest interest 
and great candor. While he is not and cannot be 
a factor in attaining any desired poHtical results 
for the South, he shares the hopes expressed by the 
great mass of the more intelh'gent Southern people, 
that all the difficult problems will yet be wisely 
solved by gradual advancement and final harmony 
of races and sections. He was unreserved in ex- 
pressing the belief that a civil service in the South 
that would insure fidelity to government and people 
could not fail to end partisan or sectional issues, 
and unite both North and South in the promotion 
of the material interests of the whole country. His 
discussion of the relations of the two sections was 
thoroughly philosophical and statesmanlike, and 
while he will remain the one adjudged stranger to 
the Republic, he hopes yet to see the South pros- 
perous in common with a prosperous North, and 
the scars of war and the bitterness of sectional dis- 
pute healed forever. Next to a Southern Slave 
Confederacy, he believes a free Union the best gov- 
ernment for the Republic. 



MRS. JAMES K. POLK. 



There are many elegant residences on the hills 
about the beautiful Capitol of Tennessee, but one 
palatial home within a square of the public grounds 
cannot fail to attract the special attention of the so- 
journer. A wide lawn extends back some fifty yards 
from the street, where stands an old-time Southern 
mansion, with the colossal pillar that is the pride of 
the plantation architect, and the wide halls and capa- 
cious rooms so common in the best residences of the 
South. The walls and doors and shades bear un- 
mistakable evidence of age, with here and there the 
stealthy prints of decay, but the easy-chairs on the 
portico, the cordial welcome extended by the servant, 
and the profusion of well-worn sofas and rockers, 
located with the irregularity that unconventional com- 
fort dictates, tell how freely the gates open to the 
visitor. This is the home of Mrs. Polk, widow of 
the ex-President of the United States, who has sur- 

239 



240 ^-^^ SOUTH. 

vived her honored husband nearly four decades, and 
has seen all his contemporaries pass away. Although 
the storms of more than fourscore years have fallen 
upon her she is yet cheerful as a lass of twenty, and 
her smile is as natural and as free as it could have 
been when it was lavished upon the generation that 
is now forgotten. The brown curls of her youth are 
yet faultlessly imitated, although threaded in silver, 
on her finely-cast forehead, and her turban crown 
of black with the widow's silver lining gives her the 
appearance of a genial and well-preserved dame of 
sixty summers. Her step is feeble, but her eyes are 
scarcely dimmed by the long lapse of more than 
patriarchal years, and her memory is unabated. She 
does not tolerate in a conventional way the many 
trespassers upon her time, but she greets all with 
queenly dignity, and yet with that generous welcome 
that makes every visitor mark his or her visit as one 
of the fadeless memories of life. She is glad to have 
the stranger as her guest, and she talks of both the 
past and the present with a degree of interest, intelli- 
gence, and freedom from the common weaknesses of 
age which charm every class of listeners. I had 
never met either her or her husband, and I feared that 
my visit would be an intrusion upon the retirement 



MRS. JAMES K. POLK. 24 1 

of a feeble woman harassed by the calls of the curi- 
ous, but she met me with the expression, *' I saw by 
the morning papers that you were in the city, and 
I hoped that you would not pass me by." A visit 
that was intended to be only the briefest of calls was 
thus prolonged into hours, and then reluctantly termi- 
nated only because other and imperative engagements 
could not be further encroached upon. She is a con- 
stant reader of the leading newspapers, and is as well 
informed about the events of the present as she was 
of the politics and conflicts of the days of Clay, 
when her husband triumphed over the most idolized 
political leader of our history, and her discussion of 
Clay and his galaxy of brilliant contemporaries is 
wonderfully interesting and instructive. She realizes 
that times and customs have greatly changed, both 
in the nation and in its capital, and she speaks of it 
with all her natural devotion for the customs of the 
past, but with a delicacy and liberality which forbid 
offence to the most positive convictions. She is so 
universally beloved by all parties and classes in Ten- 
nessee, that her little fortune in State bonds — all she 
possesses in the wide world — has been, by unbroken 
consent, exempted from the flood-tide of repudiation 

that has defaulted in the interest due to other credi- 

21* 



242 THE SOUTH. 

tors. Republican and Democrat, white and black, 
high tax and low tax, — all agree that the interest 
shall be paid promptly on the debt held by her, and 
in all the mutations of public credit in Tennessee 
there has been no default to the widow of James K. 
Polk. She spoke freely of the honors she has en- 
joyed, but her eye brightened with all the lustre of 
youth when she named the ovations given to her 
husband when retiring from power, and the kindness 
shown to her by her own State, and by strangers 
from every section, as the most cherished of all the 
distinctions of her life. " The worship of the setting 
sun," she said, ** is not the common homage of the 
world, and it outweighs all the flattery and pomp of 
power." 

Just forty-one years ago, on the 5th of March, 
1845, Mrs. James K. Polk entered the White 
House at Washington as the wife of the Presi- 
dent and chief lady of the land. She had then 
reached even beyond the full noontide of her 
years, as more than forty winters had entered 
into the story of her honored life. Few of the 
people of the present have personal recollections 
of the gentle grace and easy dignity with which 
she shone in the circles of the nation's most cul- 



MRS. JAMES K. POLK. 24^ 

tured men and women of that day; but the pleas- 
ant tradition of the White House that makes the 
name of Mrs. Madison illustrious as the most 
beloved of the early mistresses of the home of 
the President, is supplemented by the lingering 
memories and oft-repeated tributes in every section 
of the land, which tell of the well-merited and 
more than generous homage paid to Mrs. Polk 
while presiding as the central figure of the social 
jewels of the Republic. She welcomed at her hos- 
pitable board the Clays, the Websters, the Calhouns, 
the Bentons, the Bells, the Buchanans of our his- 
tory, and in all the bitter conflicts of the disputing 
giants of the last generation, the more than re- 
spect that grows into the reverence of affection 
was commanded from all by the lady of the 
White House. Soon after the retirement of her 
honored husband from the highest civil trust of 
the world he was suddenly called, in the full " 
vigor of his life, to join the great majority beyond, 
and the whole nation mourned the common be- 
reavement it suffered by the death of James K. 
Polk. Widowed and alone, Mrs. Polk fitted the 
dreamless couch of the dead in the green lawn 
that fronted their beautiful home in Nashville, and 



244 ^-^^ SOUTH. 

there the ashes of her lord repose, in daily view 
of the one whose life has had a single sorrow 
that makes all other sorrows fade into forgetful- 
ness. Unforgetting as if unforgotten, the modest 
panoply that covers the tomb of her buried love 
is the shrine to which go out the devotions of 
each succeeding day, and the room in the home- 
stead where the ex-President sank calmly into the 
sleep of death has stood unaltered and unoccupied, 
save as widowed love returns to the altar of 
blighted but unwearied affection. Thus while a 
full generation has come and gone, Mrs. Polk has 
kept faithful vigil over her husband's dust and 
her husband's honor; and she has seen eleven 
Presidents follow Mr. Polk in the chair he so 
worthily filled. 

Of all the women of the land, the widow of 
James K. Polk has long been accorded the largest 
measure of the nation's respect and reverence. 
While ever faithful to the one bright memory of 
her long and beautiful life, she has made friend 
and stranger, old and young, high and low, wel- 
come to her hospitable home, and the visitor to 
Nashville who does not cross the threshold of 
Mrs. Polk and receive her welcome, is forgetful 



MRS. JAMES K. POLK. 245 

of one of the most delightful opportunities. Every 
day her house hears the greeting of the journey- 
ing stranger, and the bright faces of childhood, 
of early man and womanhood, and of ripened age 
come and go as the grand old lady smiles upon 
them with the weight of more than fourscore 
years upon her. I lately saw her in the midst 
of a large reception she had given to Philadel- 
phia ladies, and although bowed with age, she 
was sprightly as any of the many accomplished 
ladies who assisted in her queenly hospitality, and 
her unclouded memory and unabated interest in 
public men and public events, made her ever the 
centre of attraction for all. She spoke freely and 
most intelligently and accurately of the political 
conflicts of her husband's time, of the great men 
of Tennessee who were his contemporaries, and 
of the men of national renown during her hus- 
band's administration. She spoke of peace and of 
war, and she gave the most impressive illustration 
that the whole country could furnish of the beauty 
of Mr. Lincoln's memorable teaching, — " With malice 
toward none; with charity for all." Mrs. Fall, her 
niece, and her accomplished daughter, most grace- 
fully performed the active duties of the hostess, 



246 



THE SOUTH. 



and there was regret visible on every face, alike 
of neighbor when good-by was said, and of the 
stranger when farewell was uttered. 



THE HOME AND GRAVE OF CLAY. 



"Here's to you, Harry Clay!" is a sentiment that 
lingers with me in the grateful memories of forty 
years ago. It was the toast to hearty bumpers from 
Maine to Texas, and it inspired men of soberest mien 
as well as of fervid enthusiasm. North and South, 
East and West. The love for Henry Clay was the 
grandest devotion the people have ever shown to a 
great leader. Washington was more reverenced and 
Jackson more potential, but the affection of the fol- 
lowers of Clay will stand throughout all time, as it 
has stood in the past, the sublimest monument of 
the love of the American people for a popular chief- 
tain. Although more than the period of a genera- 
tion has elapsed since the defeat of Henry Clay, his 
name yet quickens memories in every section of the 
Union, and eyes grown lustreless by age sparkle as 
with the fire of youth at the memory of " Harry of 

the West." Of all the great popular leaders of the 

247 



248 ^-^^ SOUTH. 

Republic, he was the most magnetic, the grandest in 
eloquence, courage, and patriotism, the noblest Ro- 
man of them all. Before he had passed the noontide 
of his illustrious life he was Senator, Speaker, Com- 
moner, Pacificator, and who of all the nation's jewels 
in statesmanship approached such distinction ? He 
was ambitious; but who that loved his country as 
did Clay, and was the most beloved of all his coun- 
trymen, could have been less ambitious than was he? 
He suffered defeat in grasping for the highest honor 
of the Republic, and he keenly shared the sorrow of 
his worshippers when another was crowned with the 
laurels he had so nobly earned ; but the victor, after 
creditable exercise of the great office, is remembered 
only as dating and moulding a chapter in the nation's 
annals, while the vanquished keeps in perpetual 
greenness the undying love of the people. More 
than thirty years have passed since the death of Clay, 
but his memory is as soft, sweet music on distant 
waters to the sixty millions of the Union whose 
honor, prosperity, and greatness he so bravely battled 
for. 

I find myself for the first time in Lexington, the 
home of Clay. Grand as it is in the associations 
which gather about his lustrous name and career, it 



THE HOME AND GRAVE OF CLAY. 249 

is not the Lexington that called the "Mill Boy of the 
Slashes" to seek home and fame in the Kentucky- 
wilderness. When he turned his youthful face to- 
ward the setting sun in 1797, and cast his lot in the 
outpost of civilization, the Lexington of that day was 
regarded as the future inland commercial centre of 
the South and West. It was baptized at the camp- 
fire of pioneers by the patriotic impulse that wel- 
comed the news of the Lexington battle in Massa- 
chusetts, and Virginia culture and refinement came 
to the land of Boone and made the new Lexington 
the Athens of the West. Clay and Pope both came 
from the Old Dominion to rise with the most prom- 
ising and cultured people of the new Commonwealth, 
and both honored it in later years in the Senate of 
the United States. And their dreams of social and 
commercial pre-eminence for their new Western 
home long seemed to be certain of fulfilment. Be- 
fore Clay had reached national distinction as Com- 
moner, Lexington had become the great commercial 
centre of the West, with Cincinnati, Louisville, and 
all the near West and South seeking it as a wholesale 
trading depot. Its Law and Medical colleges rivalled 
even the great cities of the East, and its temples of 
learning were the pride of the nation. Transylvania 



250 



THE SOUTH. 



University was the Yale of the South, with its charter 
from parent Virginia antedating the independence of 
the Colonies. The population of Lexington was 
once thrice that of Louisville or Cincinnati, and it 
was the centre of Southern intellect, refinement, and 
elegance. It has furnished the most illustrious line 
of statesmen of any city or county in the Union. 
Nine residents of Fayette County have borne the 
high commission of proud Kentucky to the United 
States Senate, and among them were such memorable 
names as Clay, Marshall, Breckenridge, and last, 
though not least, the present Senator Beck, who cast 
his first vote for Clay in 1844; and twice that number 
have made the name of Lexington familiar in the 
House of Representatives. 

But commerce is shifting as the sands of the sea, 
and the Lexington that Henry Clay dreamed of and 
saw in commercial and social pre-eminence three- 
score years ago, is now, as compared with that day, 
another sweet Auburn, grandest in the fragrant mem- 
ories of fugitive greatness. The steamboat's hoarse 
song was heard on the Ohio ; commerce fled to 
worship at new altars, and the city lots which sold 
at fabulous prices in the suburbs of Lexington have 
long been gathered back into heartsome and bounti- 



THE HOME AND GRAVE OF CLAY. 25 1 

ful blue-grass farms. I spent a most interesting and 
instructive morning here with one of the few surviv- 
ing contemporaries of Clay when Lexington was 
the boasted Athens of the West. Benjamin Gratz* 
has braved the storms of ninety-one winters. He 
tells of Philadelphia when a city less than the 
present Louisville, and of Lexington as the boasted 
inland city of the continent. He once pointed to 
Transylvania University in its grandest distinction as 
part of his own work, and he shared every joy and 
sorrow of Henry Clay. His eyes are sightless, and 
his fine form bowed by the weight of years, but his 
face brightens with almost the fervor of youth when 
he tells the story of the devotion of Lexington to 
the gallant " Harry of the West." The city of Penn 
that he left to become part of the future metropolis 
of the West, now has nearly a million people within 
its limits, and the Western metropolis, founded so 
hopefully in the heart of the beautiful and bountiful 
blue-grass region, is to-day a pretty village, rich in 
legend and tradition, richer in the nation's records of 
enduring fame, but with all the glory of early dreams 
departed. 

*Now dead. 



2^2 'THE SOUTH. 

A drive of a mile southeast along the limestone 
turnpike that paves the streets of towns and high- 
ways about them, brings the visitor to Ashland, the 
home of Henry Clay. The road is dotted with 
beautiful suburban residences most of the way on 
the north, and part of the original Ashland farm is 
soon presented on the south. It is in beautiful fields, 
green with the noted blue-grass that is credited with 
the creation of the famous stock of Kentucky, but 
it is now the property of the Agricultural College. 
Farther to the south is the home of John Clay, the 
only surviving son of the founder of Ashland, who 
lives the quiet life of a farmer on some two hundred 
acres of the old homestead. Beyond Ashland is the 
home of the late Thomas Clay, another son, and it 
is still in possession of his family; but the Ashland 
whose aged trees were planted and whose mansion 
was planned and fashioned by Clay himself, is now 
the residence of his grand-daughter, Mrs. McDowell, 
and her accomplished and hospitable husband. It 
was long the residence of James B. Clay, the only 
son who reached national distinction as a public man, 
and who was twice elected to represent the Lexing- 
ton district in Congress. He died in the prime of 
life, and the citizens of Lexington and the State con- 



THE HOME AND GRAVE OF CLAY. 253 

tributed to the purchase of the property for an Agri- 
cultural College. The College was not successful on 
the plan adopted, and Colonel McDowell, a Ken- 
tuckian of culture and fortune and the husband of 
the only daughter of Henry Clay, Jr., who fell at 
Buena Vista, purchased Ashland, and it again be- 
came the home of the Clays. The mansion had 
been rebuilt by James to arrest decay, but the old 
foundations were untouched, and the new Ashland 
mansion is the exact counterpart of the original, 
in both architecture and material, lacking only the 
sanctity of age. Colonel McDowell welcomes the 
friends of Clay to the home they regard as one of 
the shrines of patriotism and statesmanship, and his 
wife hears with filial pride the homage paid to the 
grandsire she more than idolizes. She is a thorough 
Clay, with all the marked features and complexion 
of her grandfather, softened in refined and elegant 
womanhood. The architecture of the house is as 
original and novel as it is beautiful. A pillared 
portico faces Lexington to the northwest, from 
which the imposing statue of Clay, two miles dis- 
tant in the Lexington Cemetery, is visible between 
the forests which skirt the road and town, and single- 
storied wings with gables to the front flank the main 



2 54 ^^^ SOUTH. 

structure and add to its palatial proportions and in- 
ternal comfort. The capacious grounds are a forest 
of shade, variegated in type and threaded with walks 
and drives and beautiful with shrubs and flowers. 
It is a home worthy of Henry Clay, and that ex- 
hausts the power of eulogy. Colonel McDowell in- 
herited Clay's love for horses, and his stable would 
have delighted Clay when he was miscalled the 
horse-racer, because he believed that men and 
women, and all the creatures committed to their 
guardianship, should attain the highest measure of 
perfection. The quality of his stable may be under- 
stood when I speak of " Dictator," a twenty-year-old 
horse, for whom he paid twenty-five thousand dollars 
only a few weeks ago, and could sell him at an ad- 
vance to-day, and of a filly for whom he refused ten 
thousand dollars at two years of age, and they were 
but two of many kindly exhibited, the least valuable 
of which as yearlings would rate in the thousands. 
" Dictator" is, I learn, the most noted horse on the 
continent, and the royal disdain with which he steps 
the earth leaves no doubt of his self-appreciated 
nobility. All that is about Ashland has the appear- 
ance of grandeur. Its gently undulating fields, neat 
as a Lancaster model farm ; the clearly exhibited 



THE HOME AND GRAVE OF CLAY, 2^K 

fertility of the soil ; the high-bred cattle grazing on 
the blue-grass coated lawns, and the primeval forests 
which freshen the fascinating landscape and stand as 
sentinels over the bountiful fields, all tell why the 
home of Henry Clay was to him the dearest spot of 
earth. 

Turning from the hospitable home of the descend- 
ants of Clay, it is most natural for the visitor to bend 
his steps to the grave of the great Commoner. No 
direction is needed, as it towers above town and 
forest, and guides the worshipper to the shrine he 
seeks. On the northwestern suburb of the town is 
the Lexington Cemetery, one of the most beautiful 
resting-places for the dead I have ever visited. It 
is grandly and bountifully shaded by forest-trees, 
variegated with evergreens, and fragrant with flowers. 
The ground is broken into abrupt undulations, and 
the little hillocks and sudden ravines are all dotted 
with the records of the dreamless sleepers of this 
lovely City of the Silent. Near the centre, on a 
gentle eminence with a large velvety lawn around it, 
are the grave and monument of Henry Clay. A 
broad base of Kentucky limestone, twenty feet high, 
encloses the dust of the beloved and lamented states- 
man, and by his side is the partner of his joys and 



256 



THE SOUTH. 



sorrows, who survived him a full decade. Facing 
the sunny South is an open grating that offers full 
view of the beautifully chiselled marble tombs which 
contain the dust of the Clays. On the top of the 
marble sarcophagus are the simple words, " Henry 
Clay," and on the side, in letters so plain that the 
passer-by can read, is the following memorable public 
utterance by Clay shortly before his death : 



I CAN WITH UNSHAKEN CONFIDENCE APPEAL 

TO THE Divine Arbiter for the truth of 

THE declaration THAT I HAVE BEEN INFLU- 
ENCED BY NO IMPURE PURPOSE, NO PERSONAL 
MOTIVE, HAVE SOUGHT NO PERSONAL AGGRAN- 
DIZEMENT; BUT THAT IN ALL MY PUBLIC ACTS 
I HAVE HAD A SOLE AND SINGLE EYE, AND A 
WARM DEVOTED HEART, DIRECTED AND DEDI- 
CATED TO WHAT, IN MY BEST JUDGMENT, I BE- 
LIEVED TO BE THE TRUE INTERESTS OF MY 
COUNTRY. 



On the large base is erected a round column of 
white limestone, nearly one hundred feet in height, 
and on the pinnacle is the life-like statue of Clay, 
facing the home his name and love have made im- 
mortal. With all his grandeur of character and at- 



THE HOME AND GRAVE OF CLAY. 



257 



tainments, his destiny was dust to dust, the common 
destiny of all ; and the heart and tongue whose elo- 
quence inspired the liberty-loving people of every 
clime are silenced forever, but his memory and his 
teachings will endure while the Republic lives. After 
half a century of distinction in both hemispheres, and 
victories and defeats which are alike immortal, the 
story ends in the peaceful shades of Lexington Ceme- 
tery, and records, after all, only the brief but fretful 
journey from the cradle to the grave. 



THE END. 



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